Touch You Last

Sarah's cousin Hannah was probably the first baby I'd ever held, and I must have been nineteen at the time. Her Uncle Fred (ten or so minutes after we first met) said, "Phew! She stinks! You hold her, Dave." And I did. I held her at arms length, like she was a scorpian or some kind of deadly snake. I could feel a room full of people all watching me, all thinking this guy doesn't have a clue, does he? After holding her for about ninety seconds, still as far away from my body as possible, somebody finally releaved me of this terrifying burden. My nieces came next. I don't have a lot of memories of holding them as newborns because, frankly, newborns scare the shit out of me. I know that whenever I did hold them, I did it in the way that small children do: I sat on a couch and crooked my arm and someone put them exactly in place (and then removed them again without me moving an inch). Huge jump in time here, but I think Jorge's baby came next. T...

Surprised to say it, but Cloverfield works for me. At least so far (54 minutes in). I don’t think it’s a spoiler if I give the very basic premise: giant monster attacks Manhattan, we follow the journey of a group of twenty-somethings trying to survive, and the experience is documented on handheld video camera. You can imagine that the camera part was the bit that made me feel a little dubious. But I’ve bought it. I haven’t real life bought it, but I've movie bought it. It’s about as realistic as an attack from an eighty foot monster—in a movie. What I'm saying is: I recommend that you check this movie out. Two notes, though, before I forget. It’s rated PG, which makes me say, “Are you KIDDING ME?” So far, I’ve seen a totally exposed chest cavity and someone’s head explode into a mist of blood. Can we at least throw an AA at it? Second, the subway tunnel attack totally cribbed the head crab sound effects from Half Life 2. I may or may not chime in later to say whether I lik...

Death Proof is on right now. I think I liked this movie. I didn't see it in the theatre, but I caught the double feature (with Planet Terror ) when it first aired on TMN. I remember being unable to decide if this movie was too talky by half or if that was what made it good. Quentin Tarantino has a great talent for finding unknowns and giving them great parts (Ving Rhames, Michael Madsen, whoever the hell plays Butterfly in this movie). He also draws out great performances from actors who haven't done much in a while (i.e. Kurt "Stuntman Mike" Russell). And he also has a really big, really obvious foot fetish--more obvious here than in any movie previous (and it was pretty goddamn obvious before). This would make a good Movie Marathon pick, if I didn't think everyone had already seen it. And for the record, I don't want to be called Stuntman Mike because I espouse any of the virtues that this guy holds dear (I really, really don't), but because I j...

Twelve Weeks A lot of you have heard this story before, but before we went to the first ultrasound I'd naturally assumed I wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of what I saw. I think that in my head I was picturing ultrasounds from the olden days, where they looked like photos of deep space or of someone's colon. But as you can see, while a little grainy, everything was easy to make out. My first thought was, "That baby is HUGE for twelve weeks!" forgetting that they'd magnified things about a thousand times. I also didn't realize that I was looking at still photographs. They'd get a good angle, snap a picture, and then hold on it to do measurements. But then a few minutes in, when the technician was looking for a new angle, the kid started rocking out. He (although we didn't know it was a he just yet) actually flipped over on his side and flipped back again, way faster than I ever thought something that small could move. And for the re...

So tired. Played dodgeball. Won. Arm: hurty. Eyes: burny. Night, night.

That's what I feel like right now, because it took me forever to get a Flickr badge up on my sidebar. I mean I work on computers all day, I've got a half-dozen computer related interests that bleed into my evenings, but sometimes the most basic things don't come easily too me. Flickr was like a new language to me. A dead language . And if you've used Flickr , you know that's it not really all that complicated. Stupid today. Regardless, I've got a few photos from the Movie Marathon up there. Finally. Am old. And slow. And incontinent (but that's neither here nor there).

I'm watching The Last Man on Earth right now. It's from 1964 and stars Vincent Price, and it was the very first movie adaptation of the novel I Am Legend. Fifteen minutes in, and it's already five times as creepy as the Will Smith version. This movie works because, well... because it works . Vincent Price hasn't seen or spoken to another human in three years. He spends his days burning corpses, refreshing his food stores, and methodically searching door to door killing all of the zombie/vampires he can find. (Haven't gotten far enough in to establish what the creepy non-humans are.) Nights are spent barricaded in his home, while the zombie/vampires taunt him and try to scratch their way inside to kill him. I Am Legend never worked for me because I didn't buy Will Smith's 'being alone has made me crazy' bit, and also because the CGI monsters were so poorly done that Big Willy might as well have been menaced by these guys . And I guess the cr...