Midnight trailers

Night Moves

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

A Thousand Times Good Night

Well, when you’re going through a shitty flu recovery, you tend to spend a lot of the night staring at the ceiling, swallowing your own thrown-up stomach acid in tiny amounts - and watching trailers. Watching trailers is an excellent pastime, even when you are not sick. I often make my own in my head, to see what tone my stories are setting. Also, trailer music rocks. And pretty much anything looks promising, judging by a trailer.

(Not really – you can quickly tell what is going to suck donkey balls, just by how awfully desperate the trailer sounds. I’m thinking Divergent and The Maze runner, the blatant rip offs Hunger Games, which actually looks like parts of Hunger Games that were left out. Unfortunately, when someone made a good movie out of a reasonably cool book and it was a great success, suddenly any number of stupid movies from completely useless books are all over and the marketing for them is depressing. For two weeks I’ve been seeing noting but Divergent all over Imdb, RottenTomatoes and magazines… As if it’s actually anything to go see. People used to say Troy is terrible. Bring back Troy, please. Any  day.)

So. One can be super smart about movies before you see them.

Heck, I’m nothing if not opinionated. The only thing about all this that makes me feel extra excellent is that when I ask what General thinks, he is voicing my arguments EXACTLY. Go me.

Night moves

This looks like it’s going to be a cool, creepy movie that they stole from some cool, creepy book without acquiring copy rights and, which is the part that puzzles me, without trying to really hide the fact it’s based on that book. (Monkeywrench gang or something..) Okay, so the premise is three weird folk, two dudes and a babe, set to break a hydroelectric dam. Because, you know, dams are evil. They flood stuff and they, I dunno, make electricity, which is evil. There's Peter sarsgaard in it, who always looks evil.

This cracks me up. Those poor Chinese villages, all of which were destroyed for some evil big power plant…

I’m sorry? Have you ever actually been to a really remote area in a third world country, where there is no electricity? Where they still exist in the Stone Age? Where they marry little girls and cut off hands of thieves and a diarrhea will kill you? Oh, you think those villages are quaint? You think poverty, disease and illiteracy are quaint? You think the really smart people who managed to build an enormous source of energy for an incredibly vast population did it because they felt like it? And that life in China was so much better before electricity came their way? 

Show me one non-religious, non-military urban attempt that fails to benefit from technology. Not in books or TV shows. In the real world. 

Just once, just once I wish those morons would travel the places I’ve traveled and saw what it’s like for people who are too fucking dumb to embrace progress. All that idyllic tribal let’s hold hands and dance around the fire in the purity and generosity of nature and gentleness of life.. Please. Just once, go to a shitty backbeat third world country. And then tell me how it would all be solved if you removed their electricity, running water, sewerage and medicine, brought in by the modern folk. Just once. Just once. 

How that fucking pisses me off.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Awww, look at the little antenae on his head!

One of the cutest things my sister ever said, when I told her the TNMT are coming in again, was “Were they ever out?” :D

Now, I should stress I am an adult woman and that when I first saw the first TNMT movie, I was 13 – but I always loved it and I watched it again a few weeks back and I still loved it. I loved the costumes and the hair on April, I LOVED Casey Jones and would adore Coteas for years afterwards, up until when I saw him in Crash, where he scared me.. I loved the voice acting and the little turtles and the way gang life is portrayed, cigarettes being the worst thing any youth can ever think of doing. (Strangling a milf hooker while doing her in the ass, high on meth while the house is on fire?) I just really liked everything about that movie. I don’t remember much of what followed for the franchise, it probably wasn’t all that good.

Now Michael Bay is making a new one. Okay. Admittedly, as much as I hated Eva Green when I first saw her, I kind of like her now and as god-awful I will always think Megan Fox is, she is at least wearing clothes in this one. The turtles are a lot bigger, CGI, obviously, and kind of menacing looking. Leonardo looks like a monster (…turn-on? Probably.), though Mikey is as adorable as ever. And William Fichtner as Shredder? Sold.

I love my brain. It’s capable of equally worshipping movies such as Grande Bellesa and TMNT. Not to brag, but that’s a wide fucking span.

A Thousand Times Good Night

If you're Juliette Binoche, your burnt face will heal faster than a mosquito bite

I mentioned this before, how my dad forbade war reportage as a profession – only profession he forbade, and I’ve been reading commentary on how the director seems to assume the subject itself is enough to fill the gaps in the script…

Well, you either get it or you don’t. I have to say – and this is something General will never fully comprehend – I admire myself for being able to opt for the uneventful existence. You cannot believe the draw of photogenic action, where your only focus is.. focus. With that camera in front of your face, you actually think you’re immortal. Bulletproof. I’ve gone into shit so many times, camera first, it’s amazing nothing ever befell me, bigger than a few stones. Even a few years back, when I was way over this need to put myself between the rock and the hard place, and there were protests happening in Nepal, I intuitively ran straight into the clash zone. General had to drag me out and he was very angry. What the fuck was I thinking? Well, I wasn’t. I was auto focusing.

It’s possible that the movie will be bad or at least melodramatic and condescending, but war reporting is the same as any other terribly dangerous sport: you either do it alone or you retire and live happily ever after in Celje. Inability to choose a side always ends in tragedy. You think witless teens are cannon fodder? Who do you think is running in front of them, taking pictures?