{"id":629,"date":"2007-04-13T23:55:10","date_gmt":"2007-04-14T04:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/?p=629"},"modified":"2012-12-09T00:42:01","modified_gmt":"2012-12-09T06:42:01","slug":"friday-in-brief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/2007\/04\/13\/friday-in-brief\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday in brief"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>1) &#8220;Taught&#8221; &#8212; which meant listening to a sub-par presentation on the last World Cup. I showed some World Cup photos at the end. I also played some German pop music to supplement another sub-par presentation on Wednesday.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>2) I took off at noon, caught a ride with Di, and went to Point to watch &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Grindhouse_%28film%29\">Grindhouse<\/a>.&#8221; Two words: It Rocks. We&#8217;ve got trailers for &#8220;Machete,&#8221; &#8220;Don&#8217;t&#8221; and &#8220;Thanksgiving,&#8221; and &#8220;Werewolf Women of the S.S.&#8221;. And then we have two &#8220;features&#8221; &#8212; &#8220;Planet Terror&#8221; and &#8220;Death Proof.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The former stars Rose McGowan as a go-go dancer who loses a leg to chemical-weapon-created zombies, and after getting a wooden &#8220;peg&#8221; she ends up with a machine gun attachment where her leg had been. It&#8217;s not that that&#8217;s what the movie&#8217;s about, but come on (imitate Klaus there) &#8212; it&#8217;s a f**king ZOMBIE movie &#8230; it&#8217;s ABOUT killing things, blowing things up, blood and splatter. It&#8217;s a zombie movie <em>without<\/em> the social commentary. Plus it has Uma&#8217;s stunt-double from the Kill Bill movies as a doctor with weaponized syringes.<\/p>\n<p>The latter feature isn&#8217;t as high-powered throughout, not as campy, but it was surprisingly good &#8230; which is to say, better than I expected. I expected an adrenaline rush from Rodriguez&#8217;s &#8220;Planet Terror,&#8221; but I also felt that recently Tarantino had been a parody of his former self, not that that self was <em>great<\/em>, or as great as his fans thought. Perhaps it was his comically bad cameos on &#8220;Alias&#8221; that led to this opinion (and his cameos here aren&#8217;t anything to write home about), but oh my was &#8220;Death Proof&#8221; good. The car chase in the 2nd half? The best car chase since &#8220;Ronin.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Hands down.<\/p>\n<p>3. Di gave me a ride home after the movie and after some chatting with friends I ended up at Mother Fool&#8217;s to read a while &#8212; the 2nd Otherland book by Tad Williams. I have a hundred pages to go now and am on the &#8220;4th book\/part&#8221; of the novel.<\/p>\n<p>4. Once back at home I moved on to Poe and listened to Haunted and Hello &#8212; Haunted (her 2nd album) is superior and one of those albums where I had to think, &#8220;Oh self, why don&#8217;t you listen to this more often?&#8221; It&#8217;s got the lone-female-vocalist thing going, it&#8217;s got just a few elements of pop, it has great production &#8230; it&#8217;s damn catchy.<\/p>\n<p>5. And post-Poe? A little Ghost in the Shell, some wine (Giant 47 Pound Rooster) and maybe Starship Troopers. And a long, 2-hour call from Jen (I discussed Grindhouse, Ronin, and Shakespeare in Love [and Tom Stoppard] among other things).<\/p>\n<p>6. Now? Bed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>1) &#8220;Taught&#8221; &#8212; which meant listening to a sub-par presentation on the last World Cup. I showed some World Cup photos at the end. I also played some German pop music to supplement another sub-par presentation on Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[133,158,96,192,107,150,168],"class_list":["post-629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-myspace","tag-anime","tag-books","tag-coffee","tag-movies-2","tag-music","tag-teaching-2","tag-wine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.universalem.org\/homo_aestheticus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}