Quote of the Day

“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”  -Neil Gaiman

Movie Review: MirrorMask

My boyfriend hates cats, he will some times admit that they are cute but he insists that they are pure evil and not to be trusted. Until this movie I didn't really get what is problem was, now I am terrified of cats. You don't know true terror until a pack of hungry cats with people faces are circling you. I fully intend to have nightmares about these cats, I have marked it on my calender and everything.

I got this movie because Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite authors is the screen writer. I am not sure but I have to wonder how much of a pull he had in the art direction because this movie is visually stunning. The story is a simple sort of Alice in Wonderland tale that doen't move very quickly but you don't really notice with all the art work.

I can tell that this is Neil movie knowing his work with Coraline and Sandman. The dialogue rings true to him in every line and I think its a better testament to his skill than the adaption of Stardust. The entire movie has a rustic Circe de Solei kind of feel and the lighting for most of the movie is in shade of grey.

Tell me this is not creepy?

The truly impressive thing about the visuals is that real actors are messed with CGI in a way that comes of blended to the eye. I say this because watching slightly older cgi these days reveals the animation quickly. Don't believe, go watch LORT again and tell me if you can now see all those little times they tweaked a scene with cgi that you never caught back when the movies first came out. The jump in level of animation leaves cgi visible to the naked eye only two or three years later, yet this movie the blending and the art work makes the cgi a part of the world rather than something that stands out.

This is a must watch for anyone that calls themselves a true movie lover. Its whimsical and and daring all at the same time.

Quote of the day

"I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.


I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the martian in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."

-Neil Gaiman, American Gods


I have been feeling a bit out of sorts recently and it seems that once again the only solution is Gaiman. This man is my prophet.

Quote of the day

I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.

-Neil Gaiman (The Kindly Ones)