Nananananananana Nananananananana BATMAN!

God I loved that TV show as a child. Anyhoo, I saw the Dark Knight last night. And...I think maybe I should reserve judgment until I can see it under less extenuating circumstances. First of all, we got there late and had to sit in the front row. Not the best way to watch an extremely long and action-packed film. Also, I had the hangover from hell (and at least partially undeserved. I won't deny that I drank more than I should have, but I didn't drink THAT much.)

Anyway...it was long. It was REALLY long. And I have no problem with long movies (Return of the King, for example...awesome.) However, I think that the killing stroke was the fact that it had too many climaxes and resolutions. One crisis was averted, then the Joker got away and started a new plot, then killed somebody else, and there was a new crisis, and on and on. I honestly expected the movie to end an hour before it did. I think this is why I tend to prefer dramatic TV shows to movies, because the serial nature makes it much easier to create a drawn-out complex plot without boring people. Unfortunately, they also tend to be much lower budget because they necessarily bring in much less profit. (unless they can pick up a cult following and make a killing on DVD sales, like Firefly or Buffy)

Now, the characterizations...priceless. Heath Ledger was f'in AMAZING. Now, I'll always have a special place in my heart for Jack Nicholson as the Joker, but Heath brought it to a whole new level. He's the sort of villain that has no reason, no motivation, he just loves to create chaos. He actually wasn't as frightening as I expected him to be (although somebody in the theater did yelp when he popped out of the passenger seat of a dump truck to shoot somebody) but instead brought a sort of manic creepiness to the role. I think that the difference between the two characterizations can be summed up by their origins: In the original, the Joker was a hired thug who lost everything when his boss turned on him and left him for dead. He had a grudge, and while he was pretty crazy, he at least acted human. In the Dark Knight, the Joker just sprang out of nowhere, with no history, no known motivation, and no discernible emotion except for manic glee. The idea that somebody could be so inhuman for no known reason is what makes him so damn terrifying.

Quick comment

Also, this season of Project Runway's designers all suck balls. I didn't like a single outfit that they put out this week. And you'd think that for a cocktail dress challenge, a lot of them would at least be cute...but no. Not so much.

Lions and tigers and........oh my

So my iTunes store addiction has moved on to TV shows. They make it so easy....to go broke. My latest indiscretions involve Tin Man (the SciFi channel's "adaptation" of the Wizard of Oz) and the pilot of the Terminator TV show.

First things first: Tin Man - awesome idea, excellent character concepts...terrible execution. Now don't get me wrong, it's definitely one of the best things the SciFi channel's ever done...but that's not saying much. This is the channel that brought us Atomic Twister, the movie about a tornado that sucked up a nuclear power plant to become a super radioactive tornado, and this weekend is premiering Anaconda 3, because so many people watched the first two.

Let's start on a positive note and talk about the things that I loved about Tin Man. First of all, they took just about the right amount of guidance from the original story. And by that, I mean not very much. If they had done a faithful retelling, they'd have to deal with a whole bunch of people bitching that they ruined a classic. However, they picked up elements of character design and concepts and made them completely their own, and updated them to be more realistic. The character design for the "Scarecrow" and "Tin Man" especially appealed to me. Also, the wicked witch was FABULOUS. She channeled just the right amount of crazy fierceness, and a certain amount of tranny corsets and makeup.

Now, on to things I didn't like so much. First of all, Zooey Deschanel bugs the crap out of me.
I think it's a combination of her permanently wide-eyed look and her low semi-deadpan voice, but there just seems to be something wrong about her acting. I must say, though, she was a good pick for the role of DG (their version of Dorothy) because her brand of weirdness kind of worked for the role. There's enough wide-eyed innocence and confusion inherent in the way that she acts that fit the characterization. Another thing I couldn't stand was the crappy storyline. I mean, a misfit post-teenage girl gets thrown into another world, where she discovers that she's a magical princess and has to fulfill a prophecy? Come on, every nerdy junior high girl EVER has written the exact same storyline, and I think that it would have been better if they'd stayed a little closer to the original, where she was picked up by complete chance and thrown into a strange world. And the fact that the evil witch was her sister who's actually good but was possessed for years by an ancient spirit? boooring. It would have been much better if she were just crazy, I think. Or at the very least, that she ended up twisted instead of everything turning out beautifully once the evil witch was dispelled (by the magical power of love, no less. barf.)

Also, the world design started really well...but whoa, they tried to do way too much. Somehow it's futuristic, Western, 1920s, and magical all at the same time? Seriously guys, pick a theme or two and work with them. Don't try to cram all your ideas into one thing.

Next, I'll probably talk about the Sarah Connor chronicles, and how poor Summer Glau is going to be typecast forever. Moving from crazy teenage assassin to crazy teenage assassin robot...not exactly the biggest display of acting range. I'm just sayin'.

He's never gonna top Good Omens

So I've recently discovered Neil Gaiman. Well, not so much discovered, as actually gotten around to reading him. Long ago, I read Good Omens, which he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett. At the time, I was a much larger fan of Terry Pratchett, because he's much funnier and concentrates on fantasy writing, while Neil Gaiman is much grittier.

Anyway, I picked up American Gods a few days ago. It's a lot of fun, kind of a semi-literal depiction of religious and cultural myths clashing with the modern world and American attitudes. Unfortunately...it's been done before. Terry Pratchett's Small Gods capitalized on the same idea, except it was much funnier.

Today, I picked up his first big novel, Neverwhere. Now, this was an ADDICTIVE book. I read the majority of it in one sitting. It's kind of a Pan's Labyrinth story, or an Alice in Wonderland, where a completely normal person is thrown into a mythic world where he's completely unequipped to deal with his new reality. Unfortunately, I had the nagging thought stuck in my head that it would make a totally bitchin' movie. And it would. So much that, looking back at it, the entire thing seems kind of like a glorified screenplay. I think that the problem with it is that the visuals are so striking in the book and the plot convolutions are so simple that it does seem much like a Hollywood movie.

In the end, I kind of see Neil Gaiman as the Stephen King of modern-world fantasy. All of his stuff is good and it really draws you in, but at the end of the day, you look back and see how completely formulaic it all is. And I'm sure I'll eventually read more of his stuff, even if he's not quite as clever or original as he seems to think he is.

EDIT: As it turns out, Neverwhere started out as a TV show on BBC. It all makes sense, now...

Fierce hot tranny messes

So, the promo material for the new season of Project Runway is FINALLY up on Bravo's website. And they're gonna do a drag queen challenge this year! I'm so excited I can barely contain myself. I limited myself to reading Project Rungay's synopsis of the season so I don't know all the details, but that alone is enough to make me excited

I can barely wait to see the new season, hopefully it doesn't suck

Ratner pool - 2, Eric - 0

So, as part of phase two of my plan to trim down a bit, I've started swimming laps again in the morning. For those of you who don't remember, I tried this before about 10 months ago and ended up giving up because it kept kicking my ass.

I'm not exactly the world's greatest swimmer. Part of this whole experiment is my stubborn side declaring that I can do anything I put my mind to, and it's just a matter of keeping on it until it gets easier. It's the exact same side of me that declared that I was going to become a runner no matter what, and you know what? It worked out. I can run three miles now, even on a bad day, and I'm working on improving my speed.

My biggest problems kind of compound each other. First of all, I never really learned proper technique. As I was growing up, my parents sent me to swim lessons, but I never really had any decent teachers. Secondly, I have an innate fear of suffocation. The fact that I can't breathe freely FREAKS ME OUT. It used to be that I couldn't swim with my head below the surface of the water because I'd start panicking. Now I've gotten over it, but my technique really sucks still. I can't seem to get to the point where I'm taking oxygen in at the same rate as I'm consuming it, so I end up gasping for air at the end of every trip across the pool.

Also, swimming is EXHAUSTING. It sort of leaves me tired the entire rest of the day, which is a problem because the only time that I can fit swimming in is in the morning.

On the upside, I got on the scale today and I was under 170 lbs, for the first time since I quit swimming the last time.

I may make this a weekly installment

New Music Tuesday on iTunes has become one of my favorite events of the week.  There's almost always a surprise album release that I didn't see coming.  This week it was Ratatat's third album, LP3 (Seriously people, can't you bee more creative with your titles?)

Now I have mixed feelings about Ratatat in the first place.  They've got a really awesome sound, but it's kind of monotonous.  If you listen to the first track of their first album, you've pretty much heard the sum of their first two.

Because I've had Project Runway stuck on my mind (I'm watching the season 1 finale right now), I'm gonna do a fashion analogy.  It's like they have one dress that they redesign over and over again.  The first album was a fantastic showcase that showed that they were new and fresh.  Then, the second one came out, and it was basically a watered-down version of the same thing with a few extra bits tacked on.  Now comes the third album.  This is like the crazy deconstructed dress with all sorts of crap tacked on.  You know it's all over the place, but you can still see the original design and you guiltily think that it's actually kind of fabulous.

To describe the album, I'd have to go into Ratatat's sound.  They are semi-electronic, with a lot of layered and looped guitar.  They also like to take inspiration from baroque music.  You can totally hear a Bach fugue in some of their songs.  Unfortunately, they didn't really do anything different in their first two albums.  I think that probably the second didn't do too well, and so tried to shake things up with the new album.  It feels basically like they did their usual thing, and then cut it up and pasted it together differently, with lots of effects and added beats.  However, I think that they did it really well, even if some of it seems a little derivative (for example, the heavily vocodered vocals in the second track).  And although you can hear a lot of the same stuff, it's more like they're adding their personal touch than that they're doing the same thing again.

Besides, they use an autoharp and mix harpsichord with a hip-hop beat.  They totally get 10 awesome points for that.