Sickgiving

So I wasn't feeling good (sore throat and sinuses) over Thanksgiving and continue to be a little sniffily. I am feeling much better but still a little worn down. Rachelle was in Whittier for Thanksgiving which meant me laying on the couch sucking on a cough drop and watching instant Netflix movies through my Xbox 360. That is one of the new features of Xbox Live and is really cool. Turn on the Xbox, go to my movie queue and start watching; no waiting for them to come in the mail. Their instant library is lacking but they keep adding to it all the time. Here was my Sickgiving movies:

Dog Day Afternoon
Great movie. I thought it was going to be your sort of standard bank robbery gone awry kind of movie. Of course it has that, but I was not expecting the social issues that take place in this retelling of actual events. Pacino is great. His character is real, likeable, and just in over his head. I suggest you check it out.









Ghost In The Shell
I've seen the second GitS movie and the anime series, but I had yet to see the original. If you are unfamiliar with GitS, it is the future and computerization is at a peak. The main character and most of her cohorts are either partially machine, cyborgs, or completely synthetic with nothing original than thier mind and "ghost", aka soul. The animation was fantastic, even in the action scenes. A regrettable aspect of this "watch instantly" stuff is the inability to switch language and subtitles. I'm normally not a fan of english voice acting and this was not an exception. I know it's hard to make english dialog fit and I respect them for the effort, just not my cup of tea. If you are into film in any form, check it out.



Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End
Yes, my guilty pleasure of the bunch. Some of you are thinking: "How is this one the guity pleasure?!" but it is for me. I wasn't a huge fan of this in the theaters, I thought it was adequate/good. Wanted a little Jack Sparrow and hadn't seen it since it came out so what the heck. I may have liked it better the second time, something that doesn't happen too often for me. I'm sure everyone has seen this movie so I won't explain it. It was good enough.




Blood: The Last Vampire
This was a short 40 minute action/horror jaunt into the demon slaying world. I have seen much of Blood+ but have never seen this short original picture of Saia. Production I.G have been and continue to be dope. The animation is beautiful. Here is something I don't say often, the english voice acting was good; some of the best I've heard. Possibly because both Japanese and English are present, but whatever the reason it's good. Obviously bloody and for an adult audience



THX 1138
Georg Lucas, before he became the great destroyer he is today, began as a great provider. But somewhere around 1984, I think, he went and lost his damn mind. Strangely enough this transition happened around the time he made The Ewok Adventures, an amazing piece of fail. THX 1138 is an interesting film. It's the future and drugs are mandatorily used to pacify people. The most interesting aspect to me, and this shows where my biases lie, was in the portrayal of religion in the film. Many futuristic movies tend toward a ultra modern societal view in which religion is banned or simply lost due to lack of interest. I was very interested in how "religion" was an encouraged aspect for these people, not in a spiritual sense but as another means of control. For many people today prayer is simply a coping mechanism, and the films depiction of religious activity was far more real and disturbing than a future without spirituality at all. I liked it, liked all the actors, especially liked the themes it brought to mind i.e. absence of action, religion, big brother, sexuality, etc. I suggest it for those who are into sci/fi. If you aren't a science fiction person, I would pass on it maybe.

Ghost World
Netflix suggested this movie for me, so I went for it. The movie is from 2001 and features a young Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson as the main characters opposite a favorite actor of mine, Steve Buscemi. Buscemi plays an eclectic, nerdy guy that Birch mocks at first and then sees him as her future self. Not sure what to say about this one. I liked it well enough.









The King Of Kong
I had wanted to see this for while. This is a documentary of the battle for the high score in Donkey Kong and the men who ruin their lives in pursuit of it; I'm not sure if that's how the people view it but I sure do. This is an interesting step into gamer culture. If I may digress for a moment, I am a nerd.

We nerds can smell our own and this flick is ripe with them. There are many different types of nerds in the nerd hierarchy, but overall most will fall into a broader category of the "timid nerd". You see, nerds are used to being made fun of for their, usually, high intelligence which in turn causes the nerd to segregate themselves from the rest of humanity lest they be made fun of by the dreaded captain of the football team. Ultimately they care about how the world views them and they keep their nerdiness hidden except to those who will view their obscene amount of knowledge about a niche item as a good and enviable thing.

Occasionally there is a nerd that will arise with an ability to cross the lines of "normal" and "nerd" that usually manifests itself in something that your everyday household nerd usually lacks... self confidence. Don't get me wrong a nerd can be confident, but only in as far as their medium (video games, computers, anime, etc.) allows them to comfortably be. I'm confident enough to say that I am one of these people. My confidence came not from how smart I felt I was, or if I thought I was good looking, but merely because I didn't care what other people thought. I would go to an anime club meeting one night, playing poker another, and then be leading my floor in a revolt against the RD another night. I'm not trying to toot my own horn, whatever that means, it's just the way it was. I did what I wanted. Some people will read this or other thoughts I have written and think: "This guy is a prideful jerk" which may be the case sometimes but often I am just being me and confidence comes out. I'm human with fears too, but I guess I'm just trying to say that confidence is something others can feel and will yield to.

Now the nerd sees this person and deduces, often incorrectly, that confidence is merely an equation of actions that can be copied. In other words... they fake it. Their overcompensation is a mask to hide their fear. But they can overcompensate to a point where they fall into another official gamer category: "The Douschebag". (I imagine Eric is reading this and laughing thinking of some WoW players we have met before.) The D-Bag often is praised for his "douscebaggery" by the "padawan/leech nerds". The leech has nerdom goals for themselves but they have so aligned themselves with their Douschebag king that their own sense of being is directly effected by the victories and especially losses of the king. They envy an ability that the rest of the world sees as trite or meaningless. The D-Bag's whole world revolves round his praise and accolades from the leeches who feed the thought that his is a meaningful existence. Sad but true.

Why did I write all of this? What I just wrote is essentially the entire movie The King Of Kong.