Everybody knows by now that Spain sucks ass but I have to admit I watched a fantastic Spanish film last night. In fact, [Rec] is the best horror movie I've seen in years -- I can't actually remember the last one I liked as much. Which is a surprise, and not just due to the involvement of Spaniards. It's shot in the never-so-popular hand-held camera mode (a la Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield), and [minor spoiler] is about a zombie outbreak. Thus it has much in common with The Zombie Diaries (2006) and Romero's latest flick, Diary of the Dead (2007), but [Rec] is better than both of those. In fact, [Rec] is pretty much what all the die-hard Romero fans wanted Diary to be. Admittedly, the steadfastness and nervy resolve of the cameraman to keep filming gets a bit difficult to believe in after a while (as with all these hand-held movies), but ignore that, it's a conceit required for the film to function at all, and it didn't prevent me from verbally exclaiming at one point, "This movie is awesome!" Truth.

We actually went in to see Get Smart, but it was so lousy with lousiness that neither of us cared to watch more than 20% of it (the 20% rules holds for most entertainment modules: if a movie, book, television show, concert, video game, or mime performance isn't being enjoyed at the 20% mark, one is permitted -- in fact obliged -- abandon it for something better. Life is, as they say, too friggin' short). So we jumped over to check out this summer's Will Smith blockbuster. Hancock is actually pretty good for the first half (the 20% rule isn't iron-clad) when it's about a drunken bum with superpowers who needs a PR consultant to teach him how a superhero is supposed to behave. After that though Hancock (the film not the character) tries to do too many things with Hancock (the character, not the film), and in the space of ~80 minutes doesn't have much time for most of them. Add to the clutter a ridiculous coincidence with a ridiculous explanation, a ream of outlandish exposition, and some truly illogical goons in the third act. All of which is unfortunate since I liked Peter Berg's previous films (The Kingdom, Friday Night Lights), and have a great nervous worry about his upcoming Dune adaptation (yes, that Dune), which is now great indeed (the worry, that is, not the Dune adaptation -- I worry it won't be great, like Hancock). 5of10.

Speaking of Hancock, I've noticed a new kind of underhanded synergy going on with several recent movie advertisements. It seems some market research goons figured out that most people actually enjoy watching television advertisements for upcoming feature films (don't ask me why), which is to say they actually watch them. So now the Madison Avenue blackguards have decided to trick those poor naive television viewers with a new kind of advertisement: a movie ad that seamlessly turns into an ad for a different product. For example: superhero Hancock (Will Smith) lands with a mighty thud onto a beach, grabs a beached whale by the tail and tosses it back into the ocean, accidentally destroying a sailboat -- end actual film footage, cut to a life-jacketed family floating in sailboat flotsam discussing how happy they are with their new Best Buy camera (or some such nonsense). What is not slimy, sneaky, and annoying about this?

The Doctor Who finale was sloppy, silly, and irritating; it had some truly cringe-worthy dialogue, and terrible over-acting (Oh Catherine! Oh Doctor Who!). I suspect the script was written on the back of a cocktail napkin and edited by chipmunks. And it suffered from a problem found in a lot of these new Who episodes: it oozed with that suicidal European pacifism that bizarrely insists it would be wrong to destroy a race of evil space robots determined to purge the universe of all other life forms. As if a human killing a Dalek were somehow morally equivalent to a Dalek killing a human. (I've muttered about this sort of thing before -- BSG is also a culprit -- and it may just be a case where the desire to make a social message overrides good writing and good sense, so I'll make myself done with it here.) On the other (much smaller) hand, Davros was quite good to the extent he was used (the story would have done just fine without him), the German-speaking Daleks were amusing, and the denouements didn't quite suck as badly as I would have imagined. Oh, and the "regeneration" was a first-order, weasel-stinking cop-out. Goodbye, Russell T Davies, thanks for reviving Doctor Who, now don't let the door hit you in the ass.

I will admit that the Spanish Omelette doesn't suck. And paella can be good if prepared well. But I'm not getting near that cold soup they eat -- only a Spaniard would eat cold soup, the freaks.

Somebody douse me with current sensibility because I'm aflame with not-getting-it-at-all! If this problem continues I'll pass right through Hellboy 2 and Dark Knight with droopy-ass eyelids and restless leg syndrome, despite what all the AintitCool Kids tell me I'm supposed to be loving. Hey maybe I'm just old and crotchety already -- I was wondering when that would set in....

I don't get it, I don't get all the heaps of praise heaped upon Wall-E. Despite its length -- and I think I counted ten yawns, so that's pretty long -- it feels more like a short-subject film than a feature. There's no there there, no substance, no movie. There's some pretty cartooning to be sure, and lots of sound effects (whirring and buzzing and soft near-voices chiming and purring) but its ultimately vacuous, a film for the iGeneration, all soft and fuzzy and mindless. So blech and barf on Wall-E.

And on Wanted too, although I'm closer to getting why people like this one, and I suspect maybe a dozen years ago I might have liked it too. But alas, my eyelids drooped, my legs jittered, my mind wandered. I was somewhat acquainted with the Wanted comic book (graphic novel!), enough so that I recognized little of it in the film adaptation -- much of the sheer viciousness of Mark Millar's story having been excised, along with many of the more comic aspects: flying monsters in cape and tights, that sort of thing. And it wouldn't do to have our cinematic hero spend several months slaughtering cattle just to get used to killing things; and all the murdering of innocent civilians also had to go. Oh, and everything else that made the comic interesting, all that needed to go as well. So what was left was pretty standard fare, and pretty dull too.

This New Yorker magazine, a coffee table decoration for people who worry that their friends might be smarter than they are, publishes with a cover depicting the Barrack Oboomba Oval office: he with a turban, wife with a rifle, Osama bin Laden on the wall, US flag burning in the fireplace, etc., all clearly a satire of how some of the media have tried to portray Oboomba over the past six months. But oh... uh-oh... nobody gets it. People start flipping out, the media explodes, Oboomba Himself is insulted, cats and dogs sleeping with each other! What to do?

And me laughs because it's always amusing when an elitist publication like the New Yorker discovers how far from the mainstream they really are. They resort their brains to smug superiority (deep in there where the termites haven't yet burrowed) and pretend it's what they expected all along, never admitting that it stings a bit, this loneliness, it makes them sad that nobody really gets them, they're like David Lynch o-or the Unibomber or John Kerry, and it's just so hard to live in a society that is so much dumber than you are! Which is why The New Yorker should probably change its name to The Helsinkier or The Tokyoer because this trend isn't changing soon; the day when the average American can recognize satire on a magazine cover has long passed. And the ironic thing here is that the The New Yorker probably endorses the education policies that helped make us this way. Silly New Yorker! Satire is for Euros!

So far I'm not doing well on Summer Blockbusters 2008. Iron Man was good, and Indiana Jones 4 wasn't bad. Meanwhile The Happening was pretty bad, Speed Racer sucked, Get Smart was total shit, Kung Fu Panda was kung fu bad, Wall-E was pointless, Wanted was rudimentary, and The Love Guru was barely okay (more precisely, it was terrible with several very funny midget-related moments to elevate it). So that's about two for nine so far.

Wait no, two for ten.

Hellboy 2 has some nice dialogue, interesting settings, great effects, a hotshot director, etc., all the ingredients for a great film, but.... I couldn't stop wondering whether I really needed another Hellboy. And this film never felt like very much more than... well, Hellboy 2: a sequel to a mediocre original. I did enjoy the German guy (though why they needed Peter Griffin to be his voice I don't know), but otherwise Hypnos found me yawning.

I dreamed I was stuck in the Northwest Territories surrounded by sled dogs and snow. What kind of a name for a place is Northwest Territories? It's like naming a child Boy or a car 5-Speed Turbo Sedan; it's a description. Did the Canadians just never get around to giving the place a proper name? Friggin' Canadians. The Northwest Territorians must be really annoyed about it too (they were annoyed in my dream, but that might have been because I kept throwing yellow snowballs at them): right to the West is Yukon, one of the coolest names anywhere, and then over to the East is Nunavut, which is a great name for jokes, and then these poor dudes are stuck with Northwest Territories? It's just not fair. Also it's really cold there.

My head on snow pillows in Northwest Territory,
(What kind of name is Northwest Territory?)
The Rockies my cast off comforter,
The Mississippi Valley worn down
by my restless leg syndrome,
Quebec, my muscled bicep
(or my funky horn),
Mexico, ah Mexico,
my socks.

I am Large!
I sleep upon multitudes!

I've spent much of this morning catching up on the KDE 4 debate (does it suck, what went wrong, who is to blame, etc -- burning questions I've ignored until now because I use GNOME) and the one thing that really stood out for me, the single thing that made me livid with lividity was this: why can't Aaron Seigo (the KDE dev lead) use a frigging capital letter at the start of his sentences in blog comments!? (Example.) I realize the guy is all like Canadian and whatever, and maybe they have different standards for communication up there but here in the real world we like to start sentences with capitals in order to help differentiate them from the previous sentence (those periods are sometimes hard to spot for us geezers). This is basic grammar, and not very difficult (hell, even the Facts about Ninjas guy has it mastered). And Aaron knows how to capitalize, just look at his blog -- it's littered with properly capitalized sentences, practically flaunting them; it's like the United Nations of Capitalization in there. (On the other hand...) So why not in the comments, hey? Are they just not worth the extra picojoule of energy required to pinkie down on the shift key? He seems to manage punctuation fairly well, so the shift key does work. So maybe it's a stylistic thing, maybe he finds the appearance of capital-less text sleek and aerodynamic, as if his paragraphs were yearning to fly right out of that blog comments section and into the unfettered sky where nobody will ever have to try to read them again.

Actually, the more I learn about this guy the more I realize he's sort of famous for this, like the poster boy for message-board nitwits who can't be bothered to capitalize. Blech and Argh.

Just now I was nosing around for domain names that might better suit my gradually evolving demeanor (grumpyoldman.com, angrygeezer.com, etc) and noticed that NetworkSolutions has begun putting advertisements into whois records for some of the domains they register. Geezer.com for example returns this as part of its record:

Which is what alerted me to this madness. It seems that for $12 per year per domain you can advertise on your own whois record (NSI claims that whois queries reach over a million users per day(!)). I haven't actually found any of these yet but I imagine they're common among the parkers and squatters and similar Internet-Biz rodents. Is it Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar yet?

People keep asking me, "President Joe, what do you think of KDE 4?", so I guess I'll put my answer up here (rather than bother the television networks with a request for air time). I have in fact tried the 4.0 release and had problems with what I consider necessities; for instance I was unable to add an additional panel for my second monitor or extend the existing panel, and when I started monkeying around with the panel it stopped redrawing properly (parts would disappear until you moused over them, etc). Also, I wasn't thrilled with either Dolphin or the new menu system (and yes, I realize I can revert back to Konquerer but I never cared for Konquerer either). I did like certain aspects of the plasma interface though; it had a coziness to it, a fuzzy softness that reminded me a bit of MacOSX, so if you like that sort of thing then maybe this will be for you. I was unable to use KDE 4 for more than about half an hour before I reverted to GNOME, but I will happily check out the 4.1 release due out at the end of this month. There, happy now?

Nice! I've just noticed that Iain M Banks' mind-boggling Culture novels have finally made it into paperback reprint in the US. These are some of the best SF novels of the past twenty years (with the exception of Look to Windward, which is weaker than its predecessors, and possibly the new one, Matter, which I haven't read yet). Most people seem to pick Use of Weapons as the best of the set (although I have a personal preference for Excession), but suggest the first two -- Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games as better introductions to the universe of the Culture. Seriously, if you like space opera, check these books out.

Well it feels that way anyway. Probably not for long. In fact, yes, I feel it wearing off already.

I guess this is part of the launch for their new website -- free ebooks! (and I can attest that at least several of them don't suck). Now to convince myself that reading an ebook is anywhere near as pleasant as reading an actual book....

Sex and the City was one of those television programs that we dudes got to know -- if we got to know it at all -- through the attention of our girlfriends (or boyfriends if you're into that sort of thing), as with Beverly Hills 90210 or The OC or Dawson's Creek (only thankfully more sophisticated than any of those), none of which we dudes would care to watch alone or in the company of other dudes (except in the rare case where the goal is to make smart-assed comments about said program, or in the case where we are too intoxicated to have much preference for what's on the television -- although certain kinds of intoxicated dudes will always have suggestions), and as such I am at a loss to explain why or how I came to watch the much ballyhooed Sex and the City Movie all alone. What masochistic impulse, what thanatosic urge could have compelled me, what--- eeeegh--- I can't stand it----

Check out this dude's hilarious recap of Ironman... OK, that's better.

If Sex and the City was a chick show (and it was, Jones, it was) then Sex and the City is an uber-chick movie (the way Star Trek: the Motion Picture is an uber-geek variation of Star Trek the original series). There was not an iota of content thrown in for us dudes, not a moment's consideration; even the nudity was on old and unattractive women, and I winced when I saw it, and I cringed from it I did. It was so intensely uber-mega-chick, this movie was, so thunder-quake-battle-horn-chick that I had to pause it every ten or fifteen minutes in order to resuscitate my spirit in various desperate ways (by listening to heavy metal, throwing various balls, checking out some geek humor, shooting a handgun at rodents and songbirds, banging my head against concrete), anything to shake loose all the chickiness that got stuck in my head from this chickiest of all chick-flicks. Seriously, it's for chicks.

So what was Sex and the City: the Motion Picture all about? Eeeegh--- I don't know, the plot is kind of fuzzy for me now. There was something to do with a wedding, but the dude, Mr Big Nose, got smart at the last minute and drove off in his limo, so then the chick he was going to marry got all upset or whatever. Then the other one, the miserable red-haired chick who they really should have dumped years ago for being such a grumpy pain in the ass, she also got all upset when-- eeeegh--- too much----

Also check out this recap of 21. OK, better, better.

...and then the blond whorish one wants to have Sex in some other City with some other--- eeeegh--- a-and the uppity brunette one gets all pregnant and shits her pants and then--- eeeegh--- make it stop-----

And a recap of Hancock! Cloverfield! A Global Warming essay! Some thoughts on Uranus!

You get the idea. The movie is like two and a half hours of this, on and on and on like grinding teeth. Then there's a new sassy personal assistant character who's entire function in the movie seems to have been to set up an email filter. And there's this one dude who spends the whole movie begging for forgiveness from an irrational woman. Then there's this other dude who spends the whole movie begging for forgiveness from a different irrational woman. Then there's--- eeeegh--- just stop it----!

I was so saturated by estrogen, so steeped in progesterone after watching Sex and the City I had to crawl myself to the Spike Network and mainline some Ultimate Fighting Championship. Ah what a delightful elixir of violence! I witnessed kicking and punching, grappling and pummelling, pouncing, pounding, and pugnacity; I saw bodily injury, clawed bloody face, a finger thrust deep into another man's eye. And by the end of it, as I clung to sanity by the meager thread of Joe Rogan's voice, I believe I was more emasculated by UFC than by six seasons of Carrie Bradshaw and her three yenta friends. That's because any of these UFC guys, in any sort of mood, whether drunken and staggering, hungover and yawning, after a title bout or fresh from church, any one of them could beat my ass to the ground as casually as spitting in milk. Just to demonstrate, take a look at this video of the main event from that night. Terrifying! But also illuminating. All the freaks out there who want to ban firearms should watch this video.