Well, I don’t know. But it turns out that if you do have tapes, you shouldn’t leave them on the parcel shelf in your car. Lesson learned, Andy?
Death Proof (2007)
Part of Quentin Tarantino’s heavily publicised recent movie experiment Grind House. Death Proof was intended to be played alongside Robert Rodriquez’s Planet Terror (2007), mimicking the movie-going experience of a bygone era: the double feature schlock exploitation flick b-movie. Fake movie trailers were also put together, to be played as part of the experience.
Of course, in New Zealand I don’t think it was ever played as intended – Death Proof was in theatres in November, but I don’t know if Planet Terror has played at all. Long story short, as far as I know, nobody bothered to see it and it had a very short, not particularly highly regarded run.
So of course I still haven’t watched it in its intended form as a back-to-back double feature extravaganza on the big screen, but I have now watched Death Proof on the marginally smaller screen.
And here’s the thing: I expected it to be really bad.
And for the first part (it’s broken up into two fairly natural halves) it was exactly as bad as I expected, but it really dropped it down a cog and gave it a handful as it moved into the second half (SPOILER) where the bad guy picks on the wrong car full of girls, and proceeds to get some serious comeuppance.
In fact, for about the entire last 5 minutes I was grinning with delight, and I’m talking about an actual grin here. On my face. Not a fake grin I lie about when I write about the experience later.
Oh, and I do feel the need to mention that a pretty large part (of the bad guys downfall, and in general as a role in the movie) is played by New Zealander actress/stuntwoman Zoe Bell, playing herself as a stuntwoman! Woooo!
The bad guy really fucked with the wrong chicks. Not only was one of them was dressed in a canary yellow cheerleader outfit the entire time, and never mind that two of the others were stuntwomen, but they were driving a car in Bruce Lee jump suit livery. How could he not have seen his demise coming from miles away?
Speaking of the Bruce Lee painted muscle car. I really, really want one. I might have to get a yellow car (perhaps not a muscle car though) of my own at some point purely so I can put big black racing stripes up the mother fucker’s spine. It needs to be done. (Right?)
The general experience is interesting, the colour has been graded in a particular way, and film imperfections added to make it seem like you’re watching a well used old print – along with jumpy editing, in what seems to be a pretty decent effort to reproduce the production standards of the 60s/70s movies that are being recreated. And of course it’s a Tarantino movie, so you know that it’s going to have great music.
It really exceeded my expectations – and I think this is partly because of how average the first story was, not in spite of it – so I reckon that if you have a chance, you should check it out.
Digital Daft Punk
If fan made music videos can be this good, I say there should be more and more and more.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2cYWfq–Nw[/youtube]
(Give it a decent chance to get going, the bobbing hands at the start is just the beginning.)
Which D&D character am I?
Well, I’m glad you asked…
Pick-a-nick
It was a beautiful day on Saturday, and some smart girl had the brilliant idea of having a picnic… somewhere. So she told me to choose and venue, and prepared all the food. I ran through the possibilities, and opted to just drive all around the Waitakere Ranges, having a complete fucking blast on Scenic Drive in the Roadster (it loves the hell out of the tight twisty turns, and performs like a road eating monster), before rolling to a halt for lunch on the grass by a beach in a nice little bay.
I’m abridging the driving experience rather a lot, but how many corners do you want me to describe? None I bet. Take it as read that we cruised around with the top down lapping up the sun on a beautiful day for a long while before finally stopping for a kai.
What a lovely day. 🙂
Werewolf!
The only thing better than getting together with friends is getting together with even more friends. And people you don’t really know, but who could be friends. And people you don’t really know, who even if you may never be friends, are at least good for a lynching of an evening.
Werewolf is a perfect excuse to arrange for such gatherings. Designed to be played in a group of as many as a million billion players (well maybe not, but large groups are no problem – we played with 16 people). The scenario is simple, you’re living in a village and some number of your fellow villagers are werewolves. They get together at night when everyone else is asleep (everyone puts their head down with closed eyes and beats on the table, the werewolves are then ‘woken’ and must do their business without alerting all of the other players) and choose someone to rend limb from limb.
During the day, after discovering their newly dead pal, the villagers must try to figure out the culprit, then lynch them. Of course as the werewolves are very good at tidying up after themselves, the only evidence is in what the people around you say, and how they behave during the day. So as it turns out you’ve got a better than even chance of lynching someone innocent. Once the werewolves have culled back the herd, and equal the number of villagers, they’re then able to freely rampage and kill everyone that’s left – so there’s a pretty strong disincentive not to lynch your mates. Of course you don’t want to draw undue attention to yourself from the werewolves if you’re a villager, and if you’re a werewolf you’ll be desperate to subtly misdirect the attention of the villagers onto their innocent village mates, so there can be a fair bit of politics, and arguing, and of course a huge amount of baldfaced lying.
It’s great fun, we managed four rounds – most of the people playing had done so before, but I and a handful of others hadn’t. I was lucky enough to be werewolf (with two co-lycans) first round up, and we cleaned everyone up – it was like shotgunning goats in the verge, they really didn’t have a chance, and all three of us were left in the end, licking our happy sneaky wolven chops.
Next round up I was positioned as you see in the photo above – indicated by the pinkish arrow – the three folk marked with gray arrows were the werewolves, so it wasn’t a great surprise – in hindsight – that I was meat on the very first night. 🙂
(It’s good fun to watch a game, as a spectator of course you know everything that’s happening – as you don’t need to close your eyes during ‘night’ periods, so you see all of the werewolves, and any other characters who might have been added.
Small changes each round – for instance usually when someone is lynched during the day or mauled at night, their last act (really – there’s no talking or prolonged dramatic deaths, and once you’re dead you mustn’t contribute any further whatsoever) on leaving the table is flipping over their card, revealing whether they’re a wolf or villager or something else, but if you change it so their card isn’t flipped, the villagers never know if they’ve just lynched a werewolf or a villager – really keep everyone on their toes.
Sometimes the villagers prevailed (well, the few survivors) and sometimes the werewolves feasted until the village was bare. But it’s good fun either way, and whichever side you’re on.
If you haven’t already played and get the chance, you should jump at it. Like a slavering beast.
Making Christmas
[flv:https://morganavery.nz/media/makingchristmas.flv 320 240]
So of course you never know for sure with Christmas gifts, but it seemed to me that people really liked these.
In short: bottle of wine + Oxfam donation + painting. I like painting a great deal, but making so many at once almost felt like a chore.
First we fight, then we have cake and icecream.
I reckon it depends on the surroundings. With luck and the right terrain, and time to breathe between administering thrashings – I think I could take hundreds or thousands before I was taken down, but put me in a closed room where there wouldn’t be time to recover, requiring maximum short term explosions of brutality, and I reckon this is probably about right.
With 6 months of karate fitness under my belt I think it would be fair to double the number – I’m much faster than people expect of a big guy, but still have all the weight behind my mighty blows. (It’s been years since I trained, and I reckon that if you want to be sharp, you need to spar regularly. Ideally against small children.)
It’s important at this time of year to pause for a moment of quiet contemplation and consider: How many 5 year olds can I take in a fight?
Sorry.
I really didn’t mean to startle you. I knew after your ridiculous launch from the previous lights that you were trying to goad me into racing with you, and I really don’t know why you were doing it, I was just minding my own business, looking for some dinner. So you must have been very surprised, in your turbo VW Passat, when my little Roadster blew you the fuck away. I guess instead of spending money on that blow-off valve, you should have learned how to drive? Maybe next time.
(But it won’t be with me, I don’t know what I was thinking. I never should have taken the bait.)
Island Time
This charming fellow overlooks Stony Batter.
Only in New Zealand.
