Daily Memory

As a child in the 80's, I was convinced that I looked older than I was. This was awesome I thought, and to convey wow mature I was, I would hold myself the way I thought a grown up girl would.

In the 80's we cared little for the welfare of our hips and the official stance of an 80's teen was to place all weight on one leg and and unhinge the other so that it turned out no less than 90 degrees. It was hard to hold this pose or to be comfortable, but if you were stationary for any amount of time, this is how you had to stand.

the good, the bad, THE UGLY

So, where exactly would you wear this?

Crap I want but don't need

Aquamarine Drop/Gold Dot Necklace
Sara Hood Jewelry

Heart in Bubble - Limited Edition 12 x 8 Print
Liva Rutmane

Kloss Tower Ladder
Target

City of Ember

I like a good science fiction flick, not too often though but I prefer them to fantasy and romantic comedies any day of the week. I knew absolutely nothing about this movie, I never saw a trailer or heard it’s title out loud, but checking out the trailer I thought I would give it a little look-see. It was visually compelling, I loved the decay and the atmosphere an existence of 100watt light bulbs could do to a civilization.

Due to an unspecified disaster making the earth uninhabitable, a small fraternity of engineers known as “the Builders” created a city under the earth that would sustain life for 200 years. Placing the instructions of escape into a time-capsule that will be protected by each Mayor of Ember and will open to show everyone the way out.

Time goes on and the box is passed down to each Mayor, until the case becomes forgotten and tucked away in the back of a closet where the countdown hits 200 and the box silently unlocks. At this time, the generator that has been powering the city for two centuries begins to breakdown, causing blackouts in the city lat leave everyone in a frightening darkness each time. Each blackout is getting longer and the food rations are depleting, no one feels the need to find a way out of Ember more than Doon and Lina. Two teenagers with curious minds and who were destined to be Ember’s saviors.

Lina, a direct descendent from the seventh mayor finds the box in her grandmother’s closet and finds a crumbled message written by the Builders. Intrigued, she finds Doon and asks for his help. The two search the pipes for clues, and reveal that their father’s had joined forces many years earlier and sought the exit. The journey ended in disaster as Lina’s father drowned, and Doon’s father gave up. Together they discover the mysteries of Ember and unlock the puzzle that was left to them.

The set design was phenomenal and the cast selection was great, but it was more adventure than action.

the good, THE BAD, the ugly

Here's a tip:
cats don't like you.

There is nothing more redundant than buying a personal cat condo to place it inside of what a cat already considers to be a personal cat condo.

Babylon A.D.

Reading the comments made on iTunes about how terrible this movie was, I knew I had to get my hands on it. It’s an action flick, it can’t be as bad as they are all saying. As for the ending everyone was complaining about? I was thinking that they just didn’t understand it. Oh, they were so right. It sucked.

monologue introduces us to the future where it is dog eat dog and Vin Diesel will fuck your shit up, I mean, his character's name is Toorop, for crying out loud and this is a movie leading up to the moment of his death. Six days earlier, Vin is slopping through the rain, and I am again startled by the fact that this man may actually be chromosome challenged, once at home he begins cooking up a hearty meal of what looks like a rabbit, when a gaggle of Eastern Europeans bust in his door and hold guns to his head. Due to his steady diet of little bunny FuFu fury, Vin opens up a can of whoop ass and then proceeds to find the man who had ordered the party crashers who happens to be some obscenely large nosed man named Gorsky, named hopefully for Anatoli Gorsky, the Soviet spy, but I don't know if that much thought went into it. Well Mr. Gorsky needs Toorop's services, he must retrieve a girl and bring her to New York within 6 days. No problem for a man who quite possibly has Mosaic Down Syndrome, hey, if Corky can lead a normal life, so can Vin.

It's off to collect Aurora, the package at a convent. Aurora is like four feet tall and is attached to the eternally youthful Michelle Yeoh. To explain something about this movie, nothing is ever explained well or concluded. The best example of this would be the band of dudes in black with motorcycles who are tracking the trio very sporadically throughout. Aurora displays an inconsistent set of abilities that don’t amount to a pile of beans at the end of the film.

They visit Thunderdome where Toorop meets up with a friend who has a broad definition of connections and can get them on some submarine that appears to gather refugees and score them a set of snow bikes and yeti suits. Once at the pick-up point, Toorop and his gang gain access to the sub by clawing at small children and the elderly to get on board, when Aurora has a fucking meltdown and stabs at buttons and passes out. At about this time, Toorop’s Thunderdome friend gets the idea that this crazy bitch is worth a dollar or two and begins to devise a scheme…kinda. When they are sledding through Canada in their Yeti costumes when fighter drones shoot at them and Toorop goes down and then shoots his friend for trying to double cross him.

That evening, the three of them are huddled in a tent doing each other’s hair, and from this point on, Vin is a pussy. The action pretty much ends at the point that Toorop dies in New York, which is where the movie began. Everything after this point goes to shit. Everything stops making any sense, nothing is resolved, plots are introduced and then dropped without explanation and characters are mysteriously written out. All of this happens in the last 15 minutes mind you, so it is a big fat clusterfuck.

Daily Memory

If you didn’t play the game “hot Lava” as a kid, you were seriously missing out. The object was to cross a room without touching the floor. You could have accomplished this by jumping on furniture or on books or pillows thrown on the floor. I played this for hours and would then build a fort out of the pillows while pretending that I was hanging out with my Smurf friends. I had such a crush on Papa Smurf, he was so hot in his little red hat and pants.

Crap I want but don't need

Pressed Leaf Necklace and Earring Set
Abigail A. Percy Jewelry

Bubble Jacket in orange
Ninu

3 Bar Towel Rack with Bottom Shelf
Amazon

the good, the bad, THE UGLY

DO NOT

I repeat, DO NOT walk into ANY public restroom, or on any street or any sidewalk, or ride in any cab, visit any movie theater or have ugly toes while wearing these shoes. You could be seriously fucked if you do.

Dead Birds

You know, I have come to the conclusion, that we need more Western themed Horror movies, this genre is really working for me. I think it’s the uniforms. I stumbled upon Dead Birds on cable and missing the first 10 minutes I had to buy it because that is how I roll. Great cast, Henry Thomas, Isaiah Washington and Patrick Fugit and that mumbling guy from Bug.

At a bank somewhere, a group of Confederate soldiers are arranging to deposit two large bags of gold, when The kid from E.T. and his gang bust in and slaughter everyone, except for the female patron who happens to be rolling with the rag tag group of robbers. While fleeing the town under heavy gunfire, Sam (Patrick Fugit) is shot and William (Kid from E.T.) kills a kid. No worries.

They ride off for hours looking for a house that William was told about that they could hide in for a while. After being told that no such house was in that area by two crotchety looters who were stealing the belongings of executed Confederate deserters, they continue on until they come across a vast corn field, and on the other side, stands the house. Through the field they go, stumbling upon a scarecrow which bares an uncanny human resemblance, and are charged by a skinless beast. Firing their guns, they take down the creature and are completely unaffected by it and just walk on. The sun is still up by the time they get to the house, but is completely gone when they get to the front door. Either the house is huge, or someone screwed up in the editing room.

Once in the house, the group splits up to investigate, and discuss getting larger cuts of the gold. It is when they cross the threshold that the terror within the house begins to make itself known. Mysterious voices and apparitions of a young boy and girl with the faces of demons begin to taunt the group. Trapped in the house due to a raging storm outside, the gang remain and are divided from one another when the secret of the house is revealed, they know they will never be able to leave and the house will continue to lure and devour anyone who enters.

This was a great movie I thought, but again, my standards are low. It was well paced Lovecraftian Civil War era horror.

Daily Memory

As a child, I was either very accident prone, or the elementary school I went to was not geared to be all that concerned with the safety of a seven year old. I remember that we had a random period that came about sporadically, it usually had to do with the arts or culinary skills. Perhaps my teachers hated me because I always ended up with a knife and an onion, and later a gushing wound. It was nearly impossible for me to avoid being hurt, I even stabbed myself with the toothpick I was using to jab into a soft bean.

Well this time was going to be different, there were no onions or sharp object to break the skin, we were baking pumpkin seeds. I don’t think we even cut open the pumpkin, we just scooped out the guts and put them on a pan. Well the pan goes into the oven and later in the afternoon the seeds are ready. Well little miss fancy teacher takes the burning hot tray in her oven mitted hands and brings it around for all of us to smell and yet again, I came away scarred.

Either she held the tray too close, or I leaned in too far, or she was just angry that I wasn’t bleeding, but the edge of the try pressed against the bottom of my chin and has left me with a big scar. If this had happened 10 later, a lawsuit would have been filed, luckily I was not birthed by the boomer generation and I was left to run and fall and learn my lesson from it.

THE GOOD, the bad, the ugly

It has officially been one of those months, not even a week and a half into it and I have lost the cool composure I worked so hard at maintaining and now I feel that it is time for some zombies.

It is a proven fact that zombies can have a calming affect on a tired mind.

Seriously, it's science.

Crap I want but don't need

Japanese Garden Necklace
Laura Lewis

Ginger Lemongrass Handmade Soap
De Shawn Marie

Drop Leaf Breakfast Bar With Two Stools
Amazon

The Burrowers

Wasn’t this movie about little Ginger headed people living in the walls of my home? Oh, it’s about mutant crickets that live beneath the surface who come up at night to gobble you up. Easy mistake to make. I must admit, even though it lacked ginger midgets, I found this straight to video movie actually quite enjoyable.

Set in the Dakota territories in the late 19th century, the movie slowly gains focus on a young woman and a hot Irish bloke who we discover with the voice over work, that he is practicing his proposal of his sweetheart Maryanne. He gives her a Celtic broach and she gives him a kiss, but that night at home with her family, they are rushed to the cellar and are taken. When the Hot Patty McIrish comes calling to get a booty call or whatever, he finds them gone and a large hole in the earth. Believing it to be Indians who abducted them, Hot Patty McIrish rides off to find his boss who was busy having a picnic with the pretty widow and her son and warn him of the Indian invasion.

Forming a small search party, Boss guy, boss guy’s girlfriends son, hot Patty McIrish and, holy crap, is that Clancy Brown? It’s official, this movie rocks. Anyway they ride off to find the missing family of settlers and meet up with a band of soldiers, who’s commanding officer has a kick-ass ‘stache and a proclivity for torturing Indians. As men begin to vanish, doubt about the abductors being natives begins to grow in the minds of our heroes. Ditching the crazy ‘Stache man and his gang and gaining a friend in the black ex-slave with an Irish name, the five head off on their own, when they stumble across the paralyzed body of a young woman who had been buried in the shallow ground, a victim of the Burrowers.

Terrified and hunted, the search for what the Burrowers are and how to kill them and retrieve McIrish’s babe so he can finally propose is officially on.

I have to tell you, there were a few times where I covered my face anticipating something creepy. The fear you feel in the audience is fueled by the great use of imagery and the build-up of terror in being hunted by the unknown in the badlands beyond civilization and surrounded by people who perceive one another to be enemies.

the good, THE BAD, the ugly

Flipendo!

I bloody hate LOL catz.
Seriously, fuck those guys.

Crap I want but don't need

Tall Bamboo wall vinyl stickers
Single Stone Studios

Large Black Leather Jewelry Box
Overstock

grey stretch cotton 'Harlow' cropped jacket
Bluefly

Walled In

I must admit that I thought the premise of this movie sounded interesting. You’ve got a mysterious building wrought with scandal as 15 years earlier 16 bodies had been cemented into the walls and after all these years the building must be torn down. Based on a French novel Les Emmeures it could have been an interesting movie, but alas, it was plain and very little made any use of common sense.

The intro of the movie was a bit of a bait and switch, a little girl wakes up in a cement tomb confused and calling for her father, when faucets at the base of the walls begin to pour out wet cement, filling up the small room and we see the little girl scream as she is lost in the grey matter. It is downhill from this point I’m afraid as it transitions lightning fast to our protagonist’s graduation party. Having just graduated in engineering, Samantha will be joining her father’s company of blowing up buildings and possibly a partner if she completes a job on her own. Oh boy!

Anyway, Sam trundles up to her first assignment. Sitting in the middle of some swampy weed infested field hours away from anything, is a ridiculously large block of cement disguised as an apartment building. At least she gets to blow it up right? Sam enters into a gargantuan lobby straight out of Gotham City. I’m thinking this place is empty, you know, because it is going to be destroyed and everything, you would think that any tenants or squatters would have been sent eviction notices weeks earlier than this. It is not empty however, it still has four of the original occupants living within. The first that Sam meets is this freaky cat faced lady who is the care taker and her son who takes Sam on a tour of the building, the other two don’t really matter.

Sam is given a list of really stupid rules while touring the halls, and she is apparently forbidden from going to the 8th floor which was where the architect, Malestrazza, lived before he was a victim in the murders 15 years earlier. And she can’t go to the roof for no reason at all. The building is being torn down, who cares!

You see all of four minutes of Sam working on establishing the weak points of the building to lay the explosions. She has a laser pointing thing, blue prints and a can of spray paint and either sucks at her job, or was more interested in the mystery of Malestrazza’s building than I was because four minutes of work is all you see her do. I want this job! Anyway, the “mystery” unfolds rather un-mysteriously and is so unspectacular that I wept for the time I had just wasted.

I was however surprised that the actor Mischa Barton who played Samantha did not channel her character from The OC She is not a great actress, but is not as bad as the Duff sisters or the girl in Twilight. The movie was disappointing and the idea that it was a book before this leaves me wondering if the story was just as trite as this cinematic gem. I like the poster though.