capsule review

Everyone involved in this production can be justly proud. The dialog is clearly enunciated and for the most part entirely intelligible, for which both the onscreen performers and the sound department should be given a hearty bravo. The cinematography is also exemplary, with more than adequate attention paid to focus and exposure; you can really see what’s going on! And given the healthy vigorous appearance of the cast, we assume that the foodstuffs provided by the craft services crew were tasty and nutritious – no skimping on the rations here. All in all, this is a triumph of the cinematic art.

Surprisingly unsurprising

Why am I even watching this? Nowadays dark and quirky is a genre unto itself, so the people responsible for generating dark and quirky media content are as constricted by the form as Ford Beebe ever was by second feature oaters. You could probably make good money renting out a standing-set dark and quirky movie ranch with all the requisite dark and quirky locales in one place. Or maybe they already have and it’s Ashtabula. I’ve said this before: First it’s art, then it’s craft, then it’s shtick. (I’ll probably end up saying it again as well. It’s that good.)

Yo estoy embarazada

Constipado doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. It’s the Spanish word for head cold. Libreria means bookstore; you have say biblioteca if you mean library. Gift is the German word for poison, which could lead to some confusion. In Italian, preservativo means condom, which of course most foods contain none of, why bother putting it on the label? Maybe best of all, in Russian and a bunch of other Slavic languages, bog means god. But I said all that to say this: I have a neologism to offer. I feel like the best synonym for palindrome would be wordrow.

educational film

A flesh wound hurts less than a stubbed toe and once wrapped in a strip of petticoat offers no impediment to subsequent exertions. Bad guys know how to bonk you on the head with a pistol butt so as to render you unconscious for a time – when you wake up, just rub the sore spot a little and you’ll be okay. Tough guys never look back at explosions. Cabbies know every apartment building in town by name. You’ll need between 70 and 120 minutes to solve the one big challenge in your life. After that, everything will be just fine.

Thumbs up!

Since you’re reading this, the odds are we’re members of the same species. Walk proud, fellow human. Weak and whiny and easily damaged though we may be, our mighty brains can invent ways around our physical deficiencies with innovative technologies that confer the functional equivalents of attributes like flight, sharp pointy teeth, and in the case of some cool-ass sneakers, bioluminescence. Sure, primitive tool use has been observed in cephalopods, primates, and corvids, but it is nowhere near as sophisticated as our own. They will, for instance, often use visegrips or channelocks where a socket wrench would be more appropriate.

Monster

You find yourself zippered into a snug rubber suit. There’s a rubber head over your own actual head and you can hardly see a thing. Everything sounds muffled and strange. And you’re so uncomfortable – the suit is so tight the sweat can’t even get out of your pores and there are all these hot lights pointed directly at you and a man is yelling at you to pick up the young woman in the nightgown but you can barely move or breath and why would you want to carry her around anyway? Do you feel a swell of murderous rage?

mph X 4.7

Our initiative to get the world’s speedometers converted to angstroms per nanosecond is moving along at a snail’s pace. Actually, expressing a snail’s pace in Å/ns yields a number smaller than one, which is inelegant. So, what’s shorter that an angstrom? Well, the Planck length. It would take 6.25E+24 of those little buggers to add up to one angstrom. Wikipedia says that if a 0.1 mm dot was magnified to the size of the observable universe, one Planck length would be about 0.1 mm. So, quite small. Does thinking about that make you slightly queasy? I know it does me.