Forget that last post, the real meat is in Charlie Jane Anders’ review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen for io9.

Anders writes:

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that’s because people don’t understand that this isn’t a movie, in the conventional sense. It’s an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

Okay, so I think maybe I’ll be seeing this flick after all.

The rest of the review is fantastic, btw. It’s like that article online that explains that R2D2 was really the mastermind behind the Galactic Rebellion in Star Wars — Anders is seeing a reality a bit clearer, yet out of step, with the one the rest of us do, and it’s brilliant.

 

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As always, I look to Rotten Tomatoes to tell me what I should and shouldn’t watch.

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal.

What the fuck is Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason?

Christian Toto, What Would Toto Watch?.

Have you seen that kid’s quads? I’m pretty sure he could outrun an emu.

Dana Stevens, Slate.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: people in movies need to put some goddamn pants on.

Josh Bell, Las Vegas Weekly.

I don’t understand what Josh Bell of the Las Vega Weekly is trying to say here. That things not-exploding are more boring than things exploding? Um, yeah, of course. A box of fireworks sitting on the ground is more boring than fireworks exploding. This is, like, the first Law of Awesomeness, dude.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times.

I would imagine that if you had a male choir hanging out in your kitchen ready to sing satanic music for you at a moments notice than seeing a movie about cartoon robots is probably not a real priority in your life anyway.

Pablo Villaca, Cinema em Cena.

You can sort of figure this one out on your own, but if you can’t it’s worth translating from Portuguese into English.

And finally, the most damning review of all–

Nick Schager, Slant Magazine.

Then what the hell is the point of this movie?!

Conclusions

I think I’ll just rewatch this totally kick ass Michael Bay Verizon commercial a couple of times and call it a night.

 

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If you head upstairs to my Projects page, you’ll notice I’ve listed a couple of the Wordpress plugins I’ve been trying to put together. Scrippets is pretty well established at this point (and thankfully pretty solid), and I mentioned AutoCap (still in beta) before. What I didn’t mention, but have been using for a while now, is the third plugin, Fancy Quotes.

The Problem

Ever seen Tumblr? Tumblr builds on the weblog concept by introducing specialized small snippets to the regular post stream for things like videos, images, links, and quotes. Instead of the long form articles that weblogs favor, Tumblr — and other tumblogs — favor shorter bursts of content. I’m generally not a fan, because if I’m going to post something like a video or a link I’d like to be able to talk about, but the custom formatting of quotes that most tumblog themes use stood out to me. These themes bring the quote to the forefront, visually emphasizing it. I drew inspiration from this and created my Quote of the Day posts.

As is usual, actually implementing this formatting proved tedious. The styling involved usually required more than simply manipulating the BLOCKQUOTE element, which meant adding additional markup to my posts. If I decided to change the styling, I’d have to change the markup too. The whole thing was a mess.

The Solution

This sort of thing is exactly what plugins are for. The Fancy Quotes plugin works by looking for BLOCKQUOTES marked with class="fancy" and reformats them to support cool styling. This minimizes the amount of markup I need to add to my posts, and in the event of major styling changes in the future all I’d have to do is modify the plugin, not my posts.

Yay!

So with the plugin enabled the following code

  <blockquote class="fancy">
    I love making my quotes fancy.
  </blockquote>

  <b>Nima Yousefi</b>, creator of Fancy Quotes.

becomes

Nima Yousefi, creator of Fancy Quotes.

The Plugin

Right now I’ve got the plugin marked as version 0.90, because I’d like to do a little more work on it before I call it done. It works fine, but I think the output needs to be made a little more flexible to allow people to modify the BLOCKQUOTE’s styling in more interesting ways (right now it just wraps the BLOCKQUOTE in two DIVS), and I’d like to add an Admin settings pane with some predefined styles. I’m releasing it now so people can start taking advantage of it in the state it’s in. If you’d like to give it a try you can grab it here. All feedback is welcome, so if you have any suggestions (or if you find any bugs) please let me know.

Have fun.

Tags: Blogging • Code 

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I finally found the time to sit down and read John August’s extremely well-reviewed short story, “The Variant.” It’s available via Amazon’s Kindle service, or by direct download from johnaugust.com, and is a steal at $0.99. That’s right, for the cost of a live, acoustic guitar version of Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind” you can can get an interesting and mysterious story about an old man trying to discover why a woman smashed her way through his bathroom ceiling in the middle of the night and ran naked through his apartment. To call the story engrossing is an understatement.

What struck me as most interesting, though, is that this isn’t the kind of story that I would expect from a screenwriter. American movies are nice little story packages, with all the little details laid out of the viewer. By the end of a movie, every “i” has been dotted and every “t” has been crossed, presumably because the average movie goer is believed to be to stupid deal with gaps in the narrative. “The Variant,” however, is littered with unanswered questions. We only get bits and pieces of the main character’s background, and what we get begs for further examination. But we only get what we get. I can’t imagine a Hollywood film with this kind of ambiguity in it.

The last two books of short stories I read were David Benioff’s When the Nines Roll Over (not to be confused with John August’s film The Nines) and a collection of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, and I would rate “The Variant” very favorably against the stories found in those two (though stylistically very different from them). “The Variant” is interesting and easy to read, and definitely worth a purchase. The first 13 pages are available for free, so you can always get started to see if it tickles your fancy, but frankly the entire payoff of the story is in the ending, and $0.99 is super cheap, so I say just buy and enjoy.

Tags: Literature 

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As many of you know, I go out of my way to avoid politics on my blog… I mean, not counting the John McCain Victory Speech Drinking Game I invented, or the post I made about how stupid Conservapedia is, or the video I posted of Mitt Romney acting like a douchebag, or my very first blog post… but sometimes I feel that I have no choice but to bring to light a travesty that simply cannot be tolerated in this free and open society in which we live. Namely, the glorification of pantless demigods in the Watchmen movie.

For those that haven’t seen the film yet, it explores an alternate America, circa 1985, populated by masked vigilantes under siege by still-President Richard Nixon and that guy from that Mandy Moore movie I watched that one time because it was on HBO but totally sucked because it was 2 o’clock in the morning and for $15 a month I expect to see some tits on HBO at 2 o’clock in the morning and that stupid movie had NONE.

Central to the story is the character Dr. Manhattan, the victim of a freak accident that grants him the ability to transcend time, space, matter, energy, and pants. Yeah, that’s right, the man has no pants. And I don’t mean pants in the literal, ankle-covering slacks sort of way. Nay, I am referring to the the greater pant species: the overarching category of leg coverings that includes jeans, chinos, overalls, shorts, MC Hammer parachute pants, sweat pants, pantaloons, pajamas, gauchos, hotpants, capris, tighty whiteys, tongs, and fancy pants.

— A sanitized image of Dr. Manhattan. In the movie his junk is all over the place.

Now you might be thinking, “What the hell’s your problem, you square?” That is not an unreasonable response. After all, I am myself a strong supporter of the sans-pants lifestyle. However, the problem in Watchmen is that Dr. Manhattan is depicted as a god. While it’s perfectly reasonable for you or I to fly wang-free in the privacy of our own homes, gods are held to a higher standard. They are pillars of the community, role models to children, and, as in the case of Zeus, occasionally horny poultry. If our gods stop wearing pants, what does that say about us as a people? What does that say about the foundation of our faith? That it just hangs out there like a pair of glowing blue balls? Swaying back and forth as we walk, and occasionally getting caught on errant door handles?

In Dr. Manhattan’s defense, he does from time to time put on a suit to do interviews and attend funerals, and he also sports a pretty powerful thongs for killing the Vietnamese, but these occassional rendezvous with good taste do not negate the the general schlongitude of Dr. Manhattan in the film.

But no, we as a people cannot stand for pantless false idols to be shown theatrically. We must protect the children from Dr. Manhattan’s unclothed ding-dong, by any means necessary that doesn’t require me to put pants on. So, as a concerned citizen, I have created a petition for you to voice your support of this noble and important cause. Please visit the Dr. Manhattan Needs Pants Petition and voice your righteous indignation about Dr. Manhattan’s pantlessness. If Dr. Manhattan is supposed to be soooooo god-like, then he’s going to have to start acting like a god and put on some goddamn pants.

Thank you,

Nima

Tags: Movies 

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Those annoying New York Times commercials + Paul Rudd =

Every time David Wain makes a funny video an angel gets its wings.

Tags: Funny 

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I can’t not laugh.

Tags: Funny 

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A hilarious webcomic that extends “Family Circus” comics to include the character Scott, who, hilariously, does not suffer the foolishness of “Family Circus.”

This meme of postmodern comic strip remixing never gets old.

Via John August’s Off-Topic blog.

Tags: Funny 

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— "Face" by Hilary Talbot.

Steve Sprang’s Brushes iPhone app allows you to draw right on your iPhone/iPod Touch, and as indicated by the contents of the Flickr “Brushes Gallery”, the results can be pretty awesome.

My two favorites are this guy with the orange and this dude smoking.

Via Hilary Talbot’s Spirits Dancing blog.

Tags: iPhone 

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WellMedicated has a nice two-parter that shows 100 of the best illustrated horror film posters. Check out part one and part two.

Amazingly, my favorite illustrated horror poster didn’t make the cut, so I’m going to give my own shout out to the fantastic A Nightmare on Elm Street poster.

— One, two, Freddie's coming for you…

The poster for House is a close second, though.

Tags: Movies 

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