Down with the sickness

I hate being sick. No, really. I do. I mean, I don’t mind the occasional day off work for feeling slightly under the weather, but this has been lasting way too long. I only went in to the office one day this week, and that turned out to be a huge mistake. I woke up feeling worse and called off yet again. To make things worse, I’m in the massive drainage part of the illness and I ran out of Kleenex early this afternoon. That, of course, meant that I would have to actually leave the house and pick up some more. I did so and also got some vitamin supplements, namely Echinacea and Vitamin C. It might have helped a bit more had I started taking them on Sunday evening when I felt this thing coming on, but I’m bound and determined to be done with this thing by next Monday.

I know I shouldn’t be feeling sorry for myself, though, because my grandfather is in the hospital. He just underwent surgery on his hip the other day and he isn’t doing so well right now. Being 86 years old, any kind of surgery can be hard on him, and he hasn’t quite been able to recover as well as he would have a few years ago. On Friday, he had an allergic reaction to an attempted blood transfusion. The doctors and nurses managed to stabilize him, but it was fairly serious, and he almost died.

So the conclusion of this half-baked entry is that illness of every type sucks. I guess that’s really all I have.

Is it just me...

Or is Howie Mandel really looking like David Draiman these days?





















I don't know. Maybe it's just the lack of hair.

Happy Valentine's Day!!!

525,600 Muuuutants!

For those of you who don't get the reference

Neato trailers

Here are a couple trailers I've seen in recent days that look really cool. It seems rare these days that I find myself really anticipating small, independent arthouse fare, but the concepts behind these are incredibly intriguing.

This first one is for a movie called Hard Candy, sure to make perverts think twice before meeting up with underage girls they meet in internet chat rooms (providing those underage girls aren't just actually guys pretending to be underage girls).

The second is for Brick. Three words: high school noir. It looks brilliant. Ironically, I saw this trailer on the DVD for Doom. That movie was far from brilliant.

Doom movie review

With the exception of people running through dark, metallic hallways, shooting stuff, the movie had about fuck-all to do with the game. The sad thing about it is that it seems like it would have taken so little to make it at least passable. I mean, I doubt fans of the game would be overly critical about stuff like lack of character or story, but when you tinker around with the essential elements of what sets Doom apart from all the other video games, that's when people start to become annoyed.

People who are familiar with Doom know it as the first-person shooter where you run around and kill demons from Hell. Not aliens. Not bioengineered monsters. Demons from Hell. So why on God's green earth did the makers of the movie decide to change the nature of the threat to genetically altered humans who turn into monsters? We've seen that before. The Resident Evil films covered that territory. (Sure, I don't think they did an altogether good job of it, but apparently enough people thought so.)

As I said before, most people won't quibble about things like lack of character development; that's not the point of the whole thing. But the filmmakers sought to give the characters identifiable traits of some sort as a substitute for development. This turned out to be truly unfortunate, as it made them unlikeable. The two that stick out most are the sleazy/horny guy (played by Joe Chill from Batman Begins) and the religious guy who quotes bible passages and cuts crosses into his flesh every time he sins or takes the lord's name in vain or whatever. You know, this latter character might have been right at home had the movie actually dealt with a literal interpretation of Hell, but it didn't, so he's just some guy with an annoyingly quirky trait.

The only point at which the movie becomes truly entertaining is during the much talked about first-person sequence. This scene basically turns into the video game, and we look through the eyes of one of the characters as he wanders through dark corridors, blowing away monsters and even using a chainsaw on one. Unfortunately, nothing before or after it is worthy of its presence.

In short, they might as well have just titled this movie Generic Aliens Rip-Off #237 and had done with it. Sure, it wouldn't have had the name recognition that would have brought more ticket buyers in, but I'm sure the money they would have saved by not paying the licensing fee for the title would have been comparable.

I mean, would it have killed them to throw in some horns, cloven hooves and pentagrams?