rainydaynews

I’d like to thank Today.com for giving me a chance to spread my wings as a blogger and get a little more familiar with the process. Unfortunately what I found shouldn’t have surprised me: Write controversial crap and you get page views. Write non-controversial crap and you don’t.
So, I learned that as much as I love doing political analysis and explaining things in basic terms for people who might not get it, or pointing out the facts that the mainstream media seems to forget (Seriously, I think they check their memories at the door), most people really don’t care. Since I am not willing to write about whatever googles hot at the moment (do we really need more links to the guy showing his ass on the chair lift?), this will be goodbye.
Anyone who cares can drop me a line for links to my other work and I’ll concentrate instead on blogging about the movies I like and those that sucked on a different forum. I may even start a political blog anew, maybe to coincide with the inaguration, but it won’t be here where I ahve to try to determine what constitutes a unique page view and what is just a returning friend. Personally, I’ve always liked friends beter than strangers anyway.
RaintheCat and I are migrating…find us on the web or email me for specifics. Steven (Rhino), I’ll miss ya. Stormy, email me! To the rest of you, I wish the best in this experiment. It just didn’t work for me.

I know there are more important issues in the world today, but sometimes it’s the little things that upset me the most.

Apparently, some idiot who once almost played for the New York Mets and who appears in an episode of Sex in the City thinks that kciking and beating a cat after it bit him is justified. This article about the incident says he claims the cats death was accidental and yet the cat died with a torn tongue, collapsed ribs and a laundry list of injuries that made me ill, so I stopped reading it.

To be honest, I know nothing about this man except that he admits to kicking a cat. Assuming as a professional or almost professional athlete he is, well, let’s be generoius, and say about 200 pounds, he got angry because a cat bit him and then kicked it. I didn’t read enough to see if he admitted to doing it more than once as the injuries would suggest because the whole thing made me a little ill.

Okay, so it made me a lot ill.

It seems likely that if convicted the man, and boy am I using that term loosely, involved will pay a fine and maybe face a short sentence in the county jail. Unfortunately, animal cruelty is not taken seriously by many courts.

On further discussion with my cat Rain and I have come up with a punishment that we think suits the crime. First, we need an angry elephant, about ten times the size of this cat-beater. Then, we need a small enclosure so the cat-beater cannot escape from his tormenter. We might need to give the elephant a weapon too, since I doubt the cat-beater was naked when he killed Morris.

To be fair, I have tripped over my cat and accidentally kicked her. She was completely uninjured. So I have lots of trouble believing that this cat-beater did not mean to kill the cat. You don’t accidentally beat an animal to death.

The more humanitarian side of me wants to suggest that he needs anger management counseling and lots of it and psychiatric help, as it is pretty well accepted that people who hurt animals often move on to hurting people, but today I am not feeling that generous.

Rain tells me that the elephant analogy might be more apt if I made it a hungry tiger instead. Then, maybe this jerk could learn to respect cats.

Over the weekend, The Dark Knight set three or four records for movie history: biggest midnight showing box office receipts, biggest three-day weekend box-office receipts and maybe some more.

To me personally, that mean that when I went to see the movie at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night, the show was nearly sold out. Friends who had attempted to go to an earlier show were there still at 10 because it was the only show with tickets available.

I got there my standard 35 minutes before the show and had to sit far closer to the screen than I prefer. I also had to sit next to some dorky recent high school graduate who couldn’t keep his mouth shut about who the characters were. It would have been a thoroughly horrible movie going experience (I really like Sunday night generally as I often see the movie with one of two other people) except that the movie was so very good!

I hoped it would be. I thought that it might be. But living up to the hype was going to be hard. Too often, when a movie has been well publicized, the movie itself is something of a let down. I was encouraged when the said Heath Ledger studied The Killing Joke graphic novel as his inspiration for The Joker and when I read Sir Michael Caine saying that his first encounter with Ledger in character had frightened him.

I was encouraged when I heard that Gary Oldman, another actor I deeply respect, had said that Ledger’s performance was Oscar worthy despite the “genre” of the movie.

But I was discouraged when I read that the movie had three villains in it. Shades of Batman and Robin haunted me and I feared that the Nolans had failed the intelligence test for writers of superhero movies. Too many or too few super villains ruin movies.

I think that my hubby hit the nail on the head when he said after the movie that this worked because it was not really a movie about Batman. It was Batman as an antagonist in the story of Harvey Dent. Aaron Eckhart was in many ways the real star of this movie.

That is not intended to denigrate Heath Ledger or Christian Bale. Both, as well as Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhall, Morgan Freeman and of course Oldman, give stellar performances. But this was the story of Harvey Dent and as such Aaron Echkart should have been the star.

I was thrilled to see the initial box office reports indicating what a huge reception the film received. I was also happy to see that Mamma Mia, with a release specifically timed to coincide with The Dark Knight, also set records as the biggest release for a musical. What saddened me was that last week’s number one movie, Hellboy II: The Golden Army sank like a stone, all the way to number 5 and just $10 million in receipts. The shame of this is the timing. At another point in the summer Guillermo del Toro’s wonderful film might have spent weeks as the top box office draw. Instead, it fell below Hancock, a far inferior movie, and Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Clearly, it was a matter of timing. There are only so many action/superhero movie watchers and their movie of choice this week was The Dark Knight. And, as much as I love the new Hellboy movie, the opening week numbers for The Dark Knight are hard to argue against.

Still, I hope that the marketing executives at the studio are smart enough to realize that Hellboy’s second week numbers are not a reflection on the quality of the movie, but are a shame of timing.

Have you ever noticed the split personalities of most women’s magazines? 

I’m not talking about Cosmo  where we all get to dream abut being young and single in a manner that we never were. You know, the single girl who lives a glamourous life and has satisfying six on a nightly basis with the hunk of her choice. Oh, and has an unlimited budget for clothes and shoes.

The truth is we all know that Cosmo is all about fantasy and not real life. so we’re not talking about Cosmo. We’re talking about magazines like Woman’s Day  and  Woman’s World, magazines that are purported to be for the average American woman.

Sadly, these magazines have a split personality. On the cover, there is almost always at lease one story promising a new way to lose 20 pounds without dieting or walkoff your excess weight and then in aother part of the cover is a lovely food dresser experiment that looks better in a glossy magazine than it will ever look in you home.

Yup, it’s the double barrel shotgun, split persoanlity approach to magazines: here’s the fat-filled gourmet meal of the month and then some fad diet to get rid of the excess fat that we just told you to eat.

I am not saying anything about the women who read these magazines other than the idea that we, like our magazines have split personalities. We all want to eat the rich, yummy desserts and somehow remain (or get) thin without working at it.

It’s a lie that we tell ourselves that we can have it all and it will be easy.

I should be more worried about that, but I’m not. Right now, I’m more interested in how to make guilt free chocoloate bon bons and lose weight while sleeping.

This weekend, Hellboy II was number one at the box office. Don’t expect it to stay there because before the week is out we get to meet The Dark Knight.

So far this summer, Hollywood has made me remarkably happy. I was surprised happily, by how good a movie and how much I liked Iron Man. Keep firmly in mind that I recognize Tony Stark as the asshole that he is, but somehow the movie pulled off charming, lovable and misunderstood asshole better than any of the comics, even The Ultimates. And, then there’s Samuel L. Jackson. I think I would watch that man read the contents of a can of peas. Heck, I even saw Snakes on A Plane just because of him.

After Iron Man, we had Prince Caspian, a very good movie that was released at a very bad time. It had to follow up Iron Man and precede Indiana Jones. Though no one expected much from Indiana Jones, and they were right, seeing it was as much about the beginning of summer as flags and Memorial Day. Honestly, I wish I had kept the $5. Yup, I saw it with Kerasotes Theaters $5 club, two weeks after the opening and still think it was over-priced.

I like Harrison Ford and Shai LeBouf, I just thought that the movie itself was too far over the top–and I like sci-fi!  I’d just like you to throw in a little bit of reality for good emasure–like the laws of physics or atomic energy.

I saw “Don’t Mess with the Zohan” because it was in the $5 movie club and was again surprised by how much I liked the movie. Adam Sandler returned to the type of comedy he does best and sent out a message as well. Funny stuff, even if the hummus jokes were a bit over the top.

We also saw The Incredible Hulk. Edward Norton is absolutely believable as Bruce Banner and Liv Tyler is great as Betty Ross. The only shame of this movie is that the studio and Norton haven’t worked out their differences so he will be back for the next one.

I saw Wanted, which I hoped I would like, and was again disappointed by the difference between the movie and graphic novel. I’ll take the novel please.  It’s not that the movie isn’t fun, it is. Angelina Jolie is always a joy to watch in this kind of role and parts of the story are interesting. But the bullet-time and absolutely ridiculous shots that are made make it funnier than cool.

Then, we saw Hancock.  Yes, I do see a lot of movies. I liked it, but it could have been much better. The studio did not learn from the last Hulk movie and realize that superhero movies need a super villain. The story had potential, but the editors seemed to get lost in the middle somewhere. Good acting made this movie!

This weekend, it was Hellboy II: The Golden Army. This movie had so much going for it that it would have been hard to screw it up, so they didn’t. Mike Mignola and Guillermo del Toro wrote the script together, playing to del Toro’s visions for the screen and Mignola’s loyalty to his creations.

The script works. Ron Perlman, Doug Jones and Selma Blair are great together and Seth McFarlane made a fun addition to the team. It grossed something like $38 million in its opening weekend, which is disappointing until you know that is 1.5 times the opening weekend of the first one.

As always, the fantastical creatures from the mind of del Toro are worth the watch. His troll market makes the fantastical creatures of the first Star wars cantina scene look like child’s play. There is a moral here too, but it is gentle, not given via sledgehammer.

Hellboy II ranks right up there with Iron Man as a must see movie of the summer!  Next up, Batman!