where are my bitches and hos?

[bluelovesorange]

said in the tone of  “Where is the horse and the rider?”...I’m not kidding, I could possibly beat Bernard Hill in terms of tone and pitch, at the moment - my voice is very gravelly.

Update on the plague front - (almost as exciting as the continual reports on AMERICA’S MAD COW EPIDEMIC, news with graphics at 11!), my nose has abdicated to Argentina, where I’m sure it’s enjoying the climate, I’m dressed like Flashdance: the Metamucil years (think beige legwarmers. Beige. Legwarmers.), and I’ve seen enough mindless entertainment and read compulsively bad novels to fill a year’s worth of Shallow Bucket posts....but I’m going to cram it all in this post.

One word: Editing. There's an epidemic of overly long films, and while some subject matter demands that epic kind of time and depth - the majority of films that are two hours and change, really don't need those extra forty five minutes....or in some cases, that extra hour.

In case you didn't know, Cheaper by the Dozen is based on the true story of an efficiency expert and his wife (the Gilbreths, sp?), who happen to have 12 children. In the film, Steve Martin is a small time football coach and Bonnie Hunt plays his wife, who's writing the story of their lives and children. In one of the various ways the movie attempts to be clever, they are called the Bakers...Baker's dozen, get it?

Anyway, Pa Baker and Ma Baker are comfortably living in a big house with their 12 children (11, actually, the eldest daughter, Nora, has run off to the Big City to be with her loser/actor/model boyfriend - played by Ashton Kutcher) who are identified as such: the surly difficult teenage son, played by Mr. Apple Dumpling Gang Tom Welling, the perky and wacky yet chic teenage daughter played by Miss Teen Idol, the supremely irritating Hilary Duff, and then two sets of twins, one pair of fraternal sisters, one pair of identical brothers, who are loud and supposed to do the cute things but being as they're three or five years old, spend most of the movie shouting and pushing people into closets. Then there's the mini-brunette faction of the family to go with the eldest Baker son (Tom Welling), a lacrosse playing Mia Hamm in the making, and her skateboarding brother, who will no doubt to grow up to be Tony Hawk and model underwear on the side. Then there's the odds and ends - the overweight Baker brother, who idolizes the eldest Baker brother, and the red-headed stepchild, sorry, the 'middle' child (though, being a middle child in a family of twelve children is sort of logistically crazy) who is incidentally red-haired, in a family full of blonds, brunettes, and strawberry blondes. And he wears glasses. And has a pet frog named Beans, whose mother is named Pork.

And that's about all the characterization you get - the younger children start to blend into each other as the film wears on, Hilary Duff is not playing a 'character' so much as she is playing Lizzie Mcguire, version the One that has eleven other siblings and the horror, she has to wear Hand Me Downs, Tom Welling carries a football and a baseball cap as equal props, the redheaded Baker curses the fact that he wasn't in Harry Potter and mopes and cries while playing hide and seek in the New Baker Mansion (the second part of the plot involves Steve Martin getting the Big Time Football Coach job he's always wanted - and moving the brood into an Upwardly Mobile Echelon, complete with snotty neighbors and chinless neighbor kid), and the wannabe Tom Welling Baker is used as a vomit mop at one point.

Mia Hamm Baker calls Redhead Baker Fed-Ex, because "the Fed Ex man dropped you off," but Hilary Baker chirpily informs the audience at the poignant emotional bit in the film, that even though she and Mia Baker sometimes want to kill each other, she would kill for Mia Baker all the time.

Jared Paladecki (Dean from Gilmore Girls) appears in the film at one point, oddly tanned, and feathered in his highlights as a sneering, Gap suited high school Elite guy, who makes fun of Tom Welling, as being from the sticks. And having 11 siblings. And basically all the cliches and stereotypes Big City People have about Small Town Values - there's a proliferation of corn falling from Tom's locker.

Tom Welling does not whup his ass, but that's because the peacekeeping Hilary Baker drags him away from a pointless act of Highschool Violence.

The mini Bakers are not as peaceloving - when they find out that a kangol wearing, latte sipping, materialistic mini marky mark has been dissing their redheaded brother, they all swarm upon the Mini Yuppies and basically re-enact the age old conflict between Upper Class and Lower Middle Class.

In between all this family bonding-disconnection (third subplot is that Bonnie Baker's book about their family has been published and she has to spend time away from them and the anxiety that ensues about keeping the family together and intact), Ashton Kutcher is mauled by a dog, because Mia Baker soaks his underwear in meat.

Really, by the half-way mark, I wanted to see him set on fire to speed things up, but what can you do? My apathy for Ashton has just been growing steadily over the year - as an Orlando Bloom fan, when I say Ashton's overexposed? That's an insult.

I've been calling the Butterfly Effect the movie in which the Beard Carries the Film.



Cheaper by the Dozen would have benefited from more strenous editing, cutting out some superfluous viewpoints, either characterizing the children better or ....not using 12 children (which would have sort of made the title irrelevant, but eh, like that's stopped people), but the end credits? Funniest bits of the movie, by far. Tom Welling dipping Bonnie Hunt and macking on her? You're allowed to live, my good man.

Now let's talk about the trailers that previewed before Cheaper by the Dozen - subtitled Reasons to Blow Hollywood off the Map.



1. The Garfield trailer. Why in the name of seven hells, do we need a Garfield movie? A badly CGIed Garfield movie, but with a live action Odie. Jennifer Love Hewitt co-stars. The worst thing was the amount of laughs it got.



2. I blame Spy-Kids for This Genre of Movie: some generic blockbuster thing with a bunch of kids trying to hack into a bank to save somebody's dad. The slew of CIA/gadgetry/mini-spies-oh, aren't they SO cute? movies (Cody Banks has a sequel. Feel free to commit Japanese ritual suicide now) is just...what's the point? It's not new or fun anymore. If I ran Hollywood, there'd be kids breaking into an Art Museum. Or possibly Assassins. Dickens gone John Woo Style!



3. Those &fLG!g#g$@!!% Movietickets.com guys. I hate them. I want them to disappear into a fiery void and never ever retrun.



4. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton - for the longest time, I thought Josh Duhamel was Johnny Knoxville. Also, Mary Sue has her own movie. The principle of the thing would be to root for Topher Grace's character, because he's the well-meaning underdog bestfriend who of course has to declare his love when the Big City Star comes struttin' into town, but really, I've decided it's the other Best Friend with the Wacky Hair extensions who needs her own movie. But oh man - this is just....it's a perfect example of our need to celebrate the mediocre. You can kiss my wish-fulfillment ass goodbye.

The other novel I received for Christmas was the first novel Daughter of the Blood in the Black Jewels trilogy by Anne Bishop.

This was not the promised "nun/abbess mystery solving" historical fantasy my friend had talked to me about months earlier, but instead it is "a ruthless game of politics and intrigue, magic and betrayal, where the weapons are hate and love...and the price could be terrible beyond imagining..."

What it really is: When Magic Cock Rings go Awry, and No one's here to clean up the Mess.



Seriously. The history of the world Anne Bishop sets up goes a little something like this - there are several realms connected however nebulously through gates of time and shadow, and there are people called Blood and non blood, and magic users of every caliber. It's a matriarch-based society for the most part, with the ruler of all realms being this crazed high-priestess called Dorothea. A witch foresees a prophecy in about seven hundred years time, a birth of a child, who will be the greatest Witch the world has ever known - and so the threads of three men will be drawn to protect and care for this girl child, when she appears.

The men are: The (grandfather) vampiric lord of Hell, Saetan (yeah, it's pronounced how you think) and his sons (the consort) Daemon Sadi (short for Sadist) and (the brother) Elucivar, who's half Eyrian and therefore is a winged creature. Jewels represent power in Bishop's world, so Black Jewels represent the highest echelon of power there is - Daemon and Saetan being particularly powerful in this aspect. Trouble is, Dorothea's threatened by power, being one of those unpleasant dictator types, so she habitually culls other witches who threaten her power, and what she does to powerful men....

Enter the Magic Cock Rings.



Anne Bishop calls them the Ring of Obedience, but the principle is the same - she rings the powerful magic using men/creatures (who appear to be almost always ripped Adonis like creatures who are pleasure slaves or whores) and if they don't obey, she zings them in the gonads.



Yeah.

Anyway, the pleasure slave brothers don't take kindly to being used as pieces of sexmeat, so they're pretty repulsed by the flesh of women...

Bishop uses a strange mixture of fantastical mythology and modern day venacular - for example, there's winged demons and seraphim and jewels of unbelievable power...but then in the beginning, a prisoner is sentenced to punishment to float in a hole-ridden, rat infested canoe....and bacon grease is smeared on his genitalia.

Which leads me to the obvious question - Bishop's violence and sexual imagery is a little more offscreen and restrained than Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series, but they both write about dark subject matter, with differing degrees of subtlety and metaphor (as in sledgehammer versus ball peen hammer), so why is that....COCK is never used in Bishop's narrative? She writes about balls. She writes about thrusting and spears. There's eunuchs. Shaving. Prick and Bastard. By this point, Cock would be a pirouette in the park.

Does using the word cock lower the 'romance' in romantic scifi/fantasy (which this book apparently is classified as)?

Other touchstones - incest, child abuse, rape, murder litter the world Bishop built. In the middle of all this dark imagining, she introduces the figure of Jaenelle Angelline, the "Once and Future Queen (Witch)."

Jaenelle is seven years old, but already she has unimaginable power - and her guardians bicker over her like a My Two Dads special crossed with Full House...IN HELL.

Do I need to tell you that Jaenelle has sapphire blue eyes, a peaked and pointy face she has to grow into before she attains her Stunning Supremacy, and has golden sausage curls that go every which way, but especially when she's riding on her horse, Dark Dancer? (or is Dark dreamer? Something to do with dark.)

Of course I don't.



Jaenelle brings the three men together (because they are bitter and estranged -Daemon thinks Saetan refused to claim him and his brother, therefore they were relegated to refuse status as bastards, and Saetan, despite being a Lord of Hell, just doesn't get young men....or young centuries old wizards, or seven year old girl-children, and Lucivar and Daemon call each other Prick and Bastard, in the way brothers do, and most of the novel is about Daemon and Saetan's attitude and evolving personalities around her. Daemon fantasizes about the woman she'll become, and Saetan is methodically checking off the list of ways to kill all her potential suitors, (except for Daemon).

It's all terribly, compulsively, bad and flagrantly purple. It's the literary equivalent of Lay's potato chips. You shouldn't eat them because they're greasy and oily and leave funny stains on your clothes and also lead up to build up in your arteries, but you can't stop yourself. I'm glad that I got it for a gift, because I would never have picked it up on my own, but the crackfactor is not so much that I would buy the remaining parts of the trilogy (though it's pretty much clear what's going to happen - Jaenelle is going to be a lovely lissome young thing of Unimaginable Power and since Daemon broke his cock ring, they're going to have torrid bouts of incredible grown up sex. After they save the universe. And Kill Dorothea. And Jaenelle stops making friends with talking animals. Like Spiders.), but borrowing them from the library?

Think of it as the gift of laughter.


Um....I had more, but then my brain sort of went {splooge} and I did see Peter Pan, and I won't say anything about it until February (looks at Juliet), but by February, it'll be Havana Nights, and it'll be All Diego Luna, all the Time.



Oh! This is for Circe, if she wants to use it.


Happy Birthday, and may the Plague leave you.



Is it weird that I have an emotional connection to a penguin with a very large conker?


That'll be Opus, for those of you who don't remember Bloom County....

Comments

[postcardjunkie.livejournal.com]

(1) One of the main characters' names in Cheaer by the Thousand is NORA!? Oh dear lord. I'm embarrassed on behalf of the name.

(2) I love Opus, too, and I miss Bloom County and Outland -- although it appears from our Sunday Boston Globe that Opus is back. Hooray!

(3) And because you disabled comments in your previous post (*grrr*) I wanted to comment on this here:
I can feel it's there, but smell? Nothing. It's terrible. It makes everything taste like plastic. Well, except for Robitussin. That still tastes like Robitussin. I don't think you could remove the taste of Robitussin.
In our family, we always refer to that stuff as melted toothbrushes, because to me, as a child, I thought that's what it tasted like. Rather pointless, but I felt the need to share.

[keenai.livejournal.com]

Why do you know what melted toothbrushes taste like?

[postcardjunkie.livejournal.com]

I don't, literally. But when I was trying to determine what the stuff tasted like, it seemed like melted plastic.

On Christmas day, we were watching a Louis Black special, and he did this whole bit about how Nyquil comes in either Red or Green, and it's the only substance on the planet that actually tastes like a color.

It's remarkable, really.

[keenai.livejournal.com]

Tom Welling looks really pretty in the previews. Does he continue to be pretty in the movie?

I'm obviously focused on the most important aspects here.

he does.

[crushw-eyeliner.livejournal.com]

I don't think he takes his shirt off at any time in the movie, but he continues to look like that. But really, he's on screen for maybe....20 minutes total? It's really a cameo..with lines.