incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

Three seasons' worth of alternate endings to the Animaniacs theme song:

( embedded video )

Lion King bloopers, animated:

( embedded video )

(This may just be nostalgia talking, but the Disney animated movies of my formative years—The Lion King, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast—seem to have way better songs than my sole recent example, Tangled, of which I can hum exactly one line of one ("Mother Knows Best") right now, after having been in the same room with it twice. No, wait, Winnie the Pooh is also a Disney flick and is extremely earworm-inducing, but it's not trying to be the same thing.)

My post about The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is now up at Tor.com. SPOILERS for the movie and everything Tolkien.

Trailers (links to YouTube):

• The Host: this ought to be full of id-tastic possibilities, but the acting seems boring as fuck, even if it weren't Stephenie Meyer.
• The Lone Ranger: you have got. to. be. kidding.
• After Earth: Will Smith and son in a post-apocalyptic child-in-jeopardy story. I notice they don't mention M. Night Shyamalan as the director.
• Oblivion: another post-apocalyptic grimdark story, this time with Tom Cruise. No thank you.
• Man of Steel: didn't they just reboot Superman? I'm confused. Also bored.
• Star Trek Into Darkness: having not seen the first, all I can say is that the soundtrack of Inception has a lot to answer for. *horn blare* Also, look, more grimdark!
• Jack the Giant Slayer: look! something not grimdark! Unfortunately the title character is clearly trying to be Westley in The Princess Bride (he even calls himself a farmboy at one point). And the actor is so pudding-faced and bland that it's hard to believe he's the title character, let alone Westley. (It's worth watching the first thirty seconds just to hear Ian McKellen's voiceover, though.)

And so perhaps if I say it, it will stop bothering me.

I say "irrationally" here only because I have not seen Skyfall and do not intend to, so have not witnessed the things that are making me angry about it.

( SPOILERS for Skyfall )

This baby is refusing to be put down and I am very tired, so while I wait for a reasonable next-feeding time, some pop culture miscellany.

The AV Club had an interview with Mark Waid about various comics projects of his, which reminded me "oh yeah, he and John Rogers (Leverage) were working on this digital comics thing, I should take a look."

So far it has two titles up, an apparent one-shot about zombie roadkill which is not something I want to look at, and a serial called Insufferable which has the tagline, What happens when you’re a crimefighter and your sidekick grows up to be an arrogant, ungrateful douchebag? What on Earth could draw the two of you back together again?

Well, okay, I'll give that a try. The physical experience of reading is nice, but the story . . . in the first week, we learn that the crimefighter and sidekick are father and son. I'll give you three guesses whose death precipitates their final break from each other, and the first two don't count.

I don't remember what week of the comic that was—it was early, but our Internet is being grindingly slow right now so I can't check—but whichever it was, was when I closed the browser tab. Because, even if it's a soft launch, starting your "let's broaden readership!" project with another fridged woman does not impress.

(Speaking of which, the essay Natasha Walks Out of a Refrigerator may spoil the plot of Marjorie Liu's run on Black Widow, but it does so in a way that made me put the collection in my Amazon cart.)

Anyway. I was reminded of this by the first ten minutes of The Losers, which starts out as all banter-y action, silly but engaging and with an actual majority of non-white characters on the team, and then ( cut for brief description of violence that upset me )

At which point I carefully closed VLC and decided to write this, because seriously, fuck all of that sideways with a chainsaw.

Finally, in less egregious movie-dom, I half-watched The Incredible Hulk (the prior Marvel movie with the Hulk, the one with Edward Norton and Liv Tyler). I say "half" because I mostly skipped the smashing-things-up sequences and most of the General Ross stuff as boring.

( spoilers, half-formed musings on disability and the Hulk )

I presume they're going to re-cast Betty Ross, since I just can't see Liv Tyler and Mark Ruffalo in the same movie (she looks a lot younger than him, just for one thing). Who do you all think they should cast as Betty?

An unbiased review of the Marvel “Thor” Movie and An Unbiased Review of the Marvel “Avengers” Movie (much longer, but worth it) (comprehensive spoilers in both).

From Ex Urbe, which also includes treasures like the Spot the Saint series, discussions of mask culture in Venice and porphyry, and a visit to Roman Legionary reenactors, plus lots and lots of stuff about Florence.

Haywire: the weekend of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I & the kids were staying with Chad's parents, and I escaped for a couple of hours to watch a movie. I was going to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but then I saw glvalentine's review of Haywire and decided to see it instead: partly because it was shorter and partly because it sounded really interesting.

I liked this less than Genevieve, for two reasons. One, I missed the first few minutes and spent most of the movie wondering if it provided some kind of context for the main character's goals and situation. I'm not sure why I felt vaguely aswim—maybe just sleep deprivation?—since in the end it was pretty simple: she was betrayed, she escaped, she finds out why, she makes them pay. I think I wasn't sure what she knew at any given time. (It is a Soderbergh movie, which means non-linear and lots of significant verbal omissions. One of which convinced me that a certain character was doing completely the opposite of what it turned out to be, which didn't help matters.) Two, I'm not that fond of the type of action movie this is. I love competence porn in capers or action movies, but I like either character development or a reveal to go with it (Ronin, The Bourne Identity, Ocean's Eleven). Haywire is instead in the "main character gets revenge and returns to status quo" mold, which I find unsatisfying. I didn't get a strong hook as the movie unfolded (character development), and I didn't have any reason to revisit my conclusions at the end (reveal). Instead I felt, as the credits came up, "That was it?", and was left with more abstract admiration than enjoyment.

So, if you like that kind of thing, you need to see this, and if you don't, it's worth background watching when it comes on basic cable in a few years.

The other two episodes in season two of Sherlock: "The Hounds of Baskerville" was very silly and not at all scary and entertained me in a way that almost entirely failed to engage my brain. Thus, I have nothing else to say about it.

"The Reichenbach Fall" was mostly terrific: I liked the updating of the conflict, and that Moriarty toned the swoopy down, and ( spoilers, minor and major )

Face Off: this is, of all things, an original reality show on the SyFy network, in which contestants design and execute special effects makeup. I saw some commercials for it and then found the whole season free on demand on my cable system one day when I was out of DVRed things to half-watch while dealing with the Pip. Anyway, I like seeing the different designs and all the craft involved, and generally find the judging clear, educational, and reasonable. Despite my best efforts, though, I find myself having opinions about the contestants as people, which I was trying to avoid because I know how manipulatively these shows can be cut to create interpersonal conflict. There's very little of that, however, so if you like how-to kinds of shows this is worth checking out.

White Collar: I dropped this show for a long time but the second half of this just-concluded season has also been maternity-leave TV fodder. Most of it was background noise, and I actually watched a couple episodes mostly on FF, but I thought the season finale was genuinely strong. (Well, except for the worst green-screening I have seen in quite some time.) And wow, Beau Bridges has a talent for playing characters who get on my last nerve (I watched SGA before SG-1 and so was introduced to General Landry in a much more confrontational posture).

I'm almost certainly not going to, as I have many hours of things I want to do while the house is quiet and I'm not responsible to anyone but the dog. But I could. So if there is anything I need to see while in theaters, let me know.

(I am half-tempted by the last Harry Potter movie, just because I suspect it would do better in theaters, and it's not like I don't know how the story goes, so having skipped the prior two shouldn't make much difference. Right? On the other hand, many things to do here and only half-tempted.)

So SteelyKid and I are home sick today, and while she napped and I ate lunch, I watched the first behind-the-scenes video from the set of The Hobbit (Facebook).

Most of it was, you know, fine; good to see Ian McKellen being adorable and a little glimpse of him, Martin Freeman, and all the actors playing the dwarves walking through a scene, but otherwise pretty familiar kinds of things from the LotR DVD extras and starting to get a little bit long toward the end.

But the last twenty seconds? Hairs on the back of my neck, seriously.

I have a lot of reservations about this project (if this sinus headache cooperates, I hope to queue up the last of the movie re-watch posts for Tor.com tonight), but I cannot deny that Jackson et al. get some things very right.

So SteelyKid went off to visit her grandmother yesterday, and Chad and I took advantage by going to see Inception tonight.

I knew almost nothing about it before going to see it, having deliberately avoided all reviews and even trailers. I knew it was about dreams and manipulating them, that someone did a lot of wire-work (*waves at glvalentine*), that it seemed to be well-received, and one other random thing that I will put behind a cut.

My thoughts without going and reading anyone else's:

I really enjoyed it. Look, it's a caper/action movie, with an ensemble, many of whom are nice to look at (this would be where my inner twelve-year-old draws sparkly hearts around Arthur), that was exciting and moved fast (mostly) and wasn't stupid and didn't have major fail that jumped out at me, and that only made me somewhat motion-sick starting about 2/3 of the way in. Of course I'm going to enjoy it (see also: Ronin, Ocean's Eleven).

Further thoughts behind the cut. Warning: I am tired (the first half of the week was very very long) and a little loopy from motion-sickness and though I worked some of this out in the car on the way home, there's still going to be some talking-out-loud quality to this.

( movie-destroying SPOILERS for Inception )

Right, now I'm off to read other people's thoughts. I know Genevieve, Leigh, and Abigail had posts, who else? Gimme links.

Cold light of day ETA: yeah, the problematic bits look worse now, but they didn't intrude much during the movie and on the whole I still enjoyed it a lot.

which I saw last night [*], is to recommend you all these two long, meaty, very well-written fanfics that are, in fact, genuinely transformative and critical of the source:

• "Concession," by obsession_inc, 28K words, PG-13 for strong language and implied violence. AU after the first movie: Tony and Pepper are both missing, and Christine Everhart slowly discovers just what went wrong.
• "Almost No One Makes It Out," atrata, 28K words, R for strong language. What the first movie would have been like if Tony hadn't been born rich.

I'd read both of these before watching Iron Man 2 [**], but collectively they embody my serious problems with that movie in a much more interesting, entertaining, and eloquent way than I could. Yes, despite being written before the movie came out. Go read them (but if you read both, read them in that order; there's a reason).

(But we can talk spoilers in comments if you want. I can always rant.)

[*] You might reasonably ask, "Kate, you didn't much like the first movie (spoilers), why did you bother going to see the sequel, which no-one is saying is better than the first?" To which I say, "Yes, but I had the rare opportunity to go out to dinner and a movie with Chad last night (thanks to SteelyKid's grandmother) and it was this or Robin Hood."

[**] You might reasonably ask, "Kate, why are you reading fanfics of a movie you didn't much like?" To which I say, "often the fics are better than the source, as here; also, it's cofax7's fault."