Operation Pink Herring

The New Moon movie verdict, 3am edition

(Er, well, it would have been, except our home computer is currently on the fritz, Blue Screen O' Deathing us every five minutes.)

So, I went to a midnight showing on Thursday. Again. It was worth it, again.

New Moon is my favorite book of the Twilight franchise. The Twilight frachise is my favorite thing ever. So to say that I was a little bit invested in the outcome of the New Moon movie would be an understatement. To say I was nervous about the outcome would be an even bigger one. Not only is this book my favorite, but it’s also the hardest to translate to the screen. There isn’t much action.  Most of the plot occurs within Bella’s head, and Bella – or Kristen Stewart’s portrayal of her -- was my main problem with the Twilight movie. Add to that the cringe-worthy special effects in Twilight, and I was really nervous. If they came up with that horrid glittering nonsense for Edward’s skin, what would a kid morphing into a giant wolf look like? I was hopeful that with the director change and the buy-in of better known actors that some of the problems would be resolved, but boy howdy, I was still really nervous.

My review in a word: Phew.

In a few more words: I loved New Moon. Compared to other, regular movies, it had some problems, yes. But compared with the fiascos in Twilight, it was practically Golden Globe worthy. Overall, it wasn’t perfect, but it was so much better than I’d feared. I really thought it was great. My only regret is that I don’t have friends nearby who’ll go see it ten more times with me.

First of all, a standing ovation for Kristen Stewart. She was so much better in this movie. There was no stuttering! No crazy-eye blinking! That, right there, made the movie so much better than Twilight. Her wardrobe was even better -- in the first movie she was dressed a little too trendily for my liking (I especially hated her fancy cell phone, which she was always talking into on speakerphone). Her wardrobe in this film was perfect. Not dumpy, but not trendy. Just nondescript jeans and t-shirt stuff. BRAVO, Chris Weitz.

I also thought Taylor Lautner did a great job. I am so happy they didn’t pull a casting change with him. I know that we were the only people in the world who watched that Christian Slater secret-spy show before it got canceled after half a season, but Taylor Lautner had a supporting role in that show and he was good. And that was a mainstream show! If Kristen Stewart got to keep her role after an absolutely painful performance in the first film it seemed totally unfair to snatch the Jacob role from Taylor, especially because he didn’t even have more than a few lines in Twilight. Anyway, he was fantastic. Unfortunately Jacob’s teeth were still an unsettling shade of white, and his wig looked, well, like a wig. Fortunately, his haircut occurs about halfway through the film and we have hopefully seen the very last of that stupid toupee.

Other gripes:

• The vamp’s makeup was, again, totally over the top. Rosalie and Alice looked the worst, but all the Cullens looked ridiculously white. That could be toned down by about 70% and the effect would still get across – they’re pale. We know.
• Alice’s wardrobe was horrible. She looked matronly and dowdy. Fail.
• Jasper’s hair looked ridiculous.
• The sunlight-dazzle effect is still here, still the same (that is to say, awful). It only appeared in Bella’s dream, so it would have been easy enough to leave it out altogether if making it look better wasn’t possible. Why, oh why?
• Edward was driving a new car – some sort of black Volvo SUV. What was the point of changing his car, which was in exactly one scene?  And while we're on the topic of cars, why didn't we get to see Jake's Rabbit?
• There were two scenes that were painful for me to watch. The first was the birthday party scene, which had been released months ago in previews and was part of the reason I was so nervous the whole movie was going to suck. The motion of opening the gift was totally fake, the drop of blood falling onto the overly magnified carpet was lame and Jasper’s slow-motion lunge for Bella was lame. Alice running off after Jasper (using the exact line from the book), Carlisle stitching up Bella’s cut: both great. The actual cut: Lame. The second scene was Alice’s vision, in which she sees Bella as a vampire. Bella is wearing a blue dress, as we know she does in Breaking Dawn, but it’s not the right kind of dress (it’s supposed to be an evening gown!) and Edward and Bella are frolicking. In slow motion. It was awful. It reminded me of the horrid flashbacks in Twilight when Edward and Carlisle are wearing those awful tweed caps and vests and everyone looks like they’re straight off the set of Newsies.
• When Bella first sees wolf-Sam in the meadow, the CGI is pretty bad. It seems even worse because of the long, slow look we get as she stares at him. As with all movie monsters, I think this would have worked better if she just got a quick look or a glimpse through the trees. The rest of the CGI was fine. Compared to the special effect disasters in Twilight, it was goddamned fantastic.
• The soundtrack, while pretty good, isn’t on par with the phenomenal music chosen for Twilight. And this, to borrow a term from the Fug Girls, is the nittiest of picks, but I was disappointed that "Undisclosed Desires" wasn’t used off Muse’s new album. I suppose I’m grateful that Chris Weitz knew enough to include a Muse song, but "Undisclosed Desires" has both a tone and lyrics that sound like they were written specifically for New Moon, and instead he used "I Belong To You"? Yet another reason I need to be hired on as an unpaid consultant immediately.  Chris, I CAN HELPZ U. 

Despite the already-high word count, my complaints are really quite minor. They stayed much closer to the book that I would have thought possible, and they did it well.   They kept in several devices and scenes that I expected to be cut, like Bella and Jacob’s age argument and Bella's date night with Mike and Jacob.

More things I particularly loved:

• The translation of the months passing – in the book this was done with blank pages. In the movie version, they instead showed Bella staring out the window in her room as the seasons change. I thought it was beautifully done, and the song they used in this scene ("Possibility" by Lykke Li) was perfect. I won’t lie, I choked up and very nearly cried. (FINE. I cried. Tears fell. Shut it.) That scene… that was New Moon.
• The visions Bella has of Edward were really well done. I didn’t know how they would do this, since in the book he is a voice in her head. The ghosty-Edward worked very well, especially in the cliff-diving scene.
• Jessica. I loved her in the first movie, and she was even better here. Her bubbly, ditzy babbling was perfect. Jessica is one character that I think is far better in the movies than in the books.  Charlie is another.  
• The whole Forks High group of kids was better in this movie. Mike and Ben were both painful to watch in the first film. They just blended into the background here, which is exactly what they’re supposed to do.
• The ending was fantastic. It was perfect.

And that, my fellow vampire nerds, is what I thought about New Moon. Now, if you'll pardon me, I have to go read every other review on the internet, which I've been ardently avoiding so that I could write my own review untainted.

Have some more pie, dear

Because of travel and surgery and general busy-ness on the weekends the past few months, we realized last weekend that we’d very nearly missed our chance to go apple picking for the season. Because I am four years old, I like to go to the pick-your-own farm every year. We pick apples off the tree, dig our own spinach and broccoli out of the dirt, take a ton of pictures and before leaving I elbow some small children out of the way so I can pet the resident goats and llamas. So last Saturday we went off along Route 70 -- despite the fact that I swore I’d never again travel that cursed stretch of highway after the wedding was over -- to pick us some apples.

It was the very last weekend they were open for the season and there were hardly any apples on the trees at all, but no matter, we’re not too proud to pick apples off the ground. In fact, we managed to find twenty-two pounds of suitable Granny Smiths to take home with us (the price goes down when you get over twenty pounds and we like bargains). We passed on the spinach and beets because we’re overloaded with spinach from our CSA farm share and I don’t know what beets are – uh, I mean, I don’t care for the taste of beets, how dare you suggest otherwise -- but stopped by the sad, deserted pumpkin patch, filled with poor Jack O’ Lantern rejects. We like pumpkins, right? We could get one or two of those and… do something with them. How much are the pumpkins, we asked. Free, the girl said. FREE. We bought twenty-two pounds of apples to save a few cents per pound, so certainly we were not going to pass up the chance to give these poor, dejected (FREE) pumpkins a home.

We took home eight orange adoptees. I had no idea how many pies a single pumpkin would make, but eight seemed like enough to have fully taken advantage of their free-ness, without quite crossing into hoarding territory. Happily, my first foray into making pumpkin pie out of actual pumpkin went quite splendidly. I found directions on how to cook a pumpkin online, followed them to the letter (!) and turned the first two pumpkins into two pies, a cookie sheet full of toasted seeds, a loaf of pumpkin bread and a gallon-sized Ziploc bag of frozen pumpkin puree. 

So now I just have six more pumpkins sitting in the kitchen. Since I don’t really like pumpkin pie (a fact that I should probably have taken into account before we started heaving free pumpkins into our trunk) and I refuse to throw any food away, I’ve obviously got to clear out some room in our crowded freezer for another bag or six of pumpkin puree.

And that, internet, is how I came to eat four vegetarian sausages whose best-by date was December 2008, two Eggo waffles and a vodka-lemonade cocktail for dinner last night. Lunch today was half a box of Morningstar Veggie Bites. I only have another box and a half of the sausages left, two boxes of the Veggie Bites (they’re not good, in case you were wondering, and the fact that we’ve had them longer than the sausages isn’t helping), a Sam’s Club bag of boneless barbeque chicken wings that I purchased for last year’s Superbowl (also not good), a box of Trader Joe’s eggplant cutlets (these are actually very good) and 1/3 a bottle of vodka to go. Yes, I suppose that I could take the vodka out of the freezer, but truthfully, we don’t have any space in the cabinets either.

Four posts in one

Can someone please shut my cat up?

Henry has never been a quiet animal. The politically correct term is “vocal”. He does a lot of meowing. He meows to announce his entrance into the room, he meows while he’s jumping onto the couch, he meows when I come in the door.

But he also does this very, very loud meowing. It’s more like howling. Yowling. Screaming like he’s stuck in a bear trap. He used to do it from time to time, maybe once a day at the most. It’s a little weird, but cats are strange animals. He also perches himself on the banister like a goat and plays fetch with a keychain. Whatever, right?

But lately, oh my god. The howling is every day for HOURS. He’s howling while we watch TV. I go up to make sure he’s not actually stuck in a bear trap and he’ll just be sitting on the floor, staring at the wall. Sometimes he’s in his cat condo, pulling himself around in a circle. What the hell? Does he miss Max? It’s not exactly like he and Max were cat-BFFs. Our cats are not friends; they largely ignore and just barely tolerate each other. So why the mourning? The very loud, very annoying mourning? Or is he just having a heated discussion with the brick wall? I don’t know what to think.

I feel guilty because he must be sad to be howling like that all the time, right? Or maybe something is just broken in his brain? He also spends a large amount of time pushing around the water bowl in the bathroom, eating hair elastics and chasing his own tail. At least those activities are QUIET.  Now he’s like a screaming baby, he just cries and yells and oh my god I don’t know what is wrong. Have some food? Some treats?  Head scritches?  Want to chase a toy mouse?  Want to get picked up?  Want to bite my hand?  Eat this hair elastic?  Here, there’s some dental floss you can pull out of the garbage!  Tip over the recycling? Chew on some plastic bags?

Nothing. Works. I am going crazy.  If I can find a cat psychologist, what do you think the chances are it will be covered by pet insurance?

The knee bone’s connected to the other thing

Some rare yet serious side effects of knee surgery:

I’ve become so used to treating my left knee gingerly (and being reminded quite indelicately when I forget) that I can’t help cringing when I see people on TV doing things that would hurt it. Jumping on trampolines, are these people crazy? Running through an airport? Sliding into second base? People, you’re going to hurt yourselves! Be careful!

My right knee, by comparison, now feels like a bionic super-knee. I’m constantly amazed at how far and how well it can bend, how I can sit with it tucked under me and go up the stairs and use it to kick the laundry basket out of the way and it doesn’t even hurt! It’s insane! The human body, it’s a miracle, you know?

I get a lot of dirty looks riding the elevator down one flight to my office. I used to similarly judge the people who were too lazy to take the stairs down one flight, so I deserve it. Judge not, lest ye become that person punching the button for basement while all the other people in the elevator sigh and eye-roll.

And it's even pink 

After carefully waiting until both of our contracts were up and then waiting again for the new crop of phones to be released, I have a new cell phone. It has internet and email and it is the best thing to happen to me, technologically speaking, since Tivo.

The one bad thing is that now when I log on to the computer in the morning, all the fun of checking my email/twitter/facebook/Google Reader and seeing what the world has been up to while I’ve been offline is gone.  It kind of makes mornings less fun, if that's possible.  But I forgive it, because it's just so cute and smart and I can't stay mad.

I kind of liked staying home better

One of the things I learned while I was at home with absolutely nothing to do is that, if left to its own devices, by body would like to get no less than 10 hours of sleep a night. At the time I felt like a lazy slouch for spending so much time in bed. What I realize now is that’s how it feels to be rested. Weird. For reasons related to circadian clocks and the conspiracy of the working world against non-morning people, I usually get about 6 hours of sleep a night, and I can manage on that pretty well. But my God, it felt good to sleep right on through to 11am. My brain, like, worked. Faster. Like I said, it was weird.

The thing about Maine

I support gay marriage.  Having just been married a few months ago, I can tell you there are a lot of legal benefits afforded to married couples.  We are now eligible to be covered by each other's group insurance policies at work, which saves us over a thousand dollars a year. The day before we were married we'd been living together for six years, we owned a house together, but we weren't eligible under each other's policies.  The day after we were married, we were.  Our insurance rates went down; our taxes will be calculated differently.  Just because we have that marriage certificate.

There are a lot of legal benefits that go along with marriage, and I don't think it's fair to deny these to citizens on the basis of sexual orientation any more than it would be fair to deny them to people based on skin color, age, or religion.  That's what I believe.  That's what I will vote for.  Not everyone agrees with me.  Many people disagree.  Do I think they're misguided and misinformed?  Yes.  Am I disappointed over the election in Maine?  Yes. 

Do I think that everyone in Maine is a stupid idiot who doesn't deserve a vote? Absolutely not.  It really saddens me to see all the hatred being thrown around.  People are saying that everyone in Maine is an idiot.  The "why" explanation in Brizzly yesterday said Maine was the "land of cretins."  Here's the thing: most states do not have legalized gay marriage. If you're calling everyone in Maine an idiot because gay marriage is now outlawed there, what does that make you, if your state doesn't allow it either? 

And here's the other thing: the election was very close.  Nearly 50% of the voters were for gay marriage. 

And here's the third and last thing: People in this country are allowed to disagree.  I don't enjoy being called an idiot because I support gay marriage.  Name-calling is completely unproductive.  Calling someone stupid is not going to help them see things from your point of view.  It's certainly not going to make them change their mind.  It adds nothing to a discussion.

Let's grow up, people.  Calling each other names isn't going to move us forward, no matter which direction you consider forward to be.  

Not as awesome as I thought it was going to be

So!  Surgery.  It went well, in that I didn't wake up in the middle of it, they operated on the correct knee and I lived.  That's all very, very good.  Surgery on the whole, however... not as cool as I thought it was going to be.

"How much fun did you THINK it was going to be?", NPW asked when I proclaimed this on twitter last week.  Well, I thought it was going to be kind of... fun?  I mean, not the surgery itself, obviously the surgery was a last resort.  But after ten months of orthopedic surgeon visits, physical therapy and rest, it was a necessity.  So, since I didn't have much of a choice, I was more focusing on the fact that I was getting an official order to sit on the couch for a week and do nothing.  No cleaning!  No going to work!  Nothing but me, my couch, my Tivo cache and a giant stack of library books. 

But it wasn't so much "you don't have to do anything" as "you CAN'T do anything."  Let me tell you, there's a world of difference between the two.  Not having to cook, clean, or do laundry sounds quite nice.  Having to smell what your cat has lovingly deposited in the litterbox all day because you can't bend down far enough to scoop it, watching the pile in t the hamper slowly grow and eventually start to spill over the sides... it's, um, frustrating?  Maddening?  Worthy of crying a few times?  All three, if you're me.   

I also forgot to factor in the whole feeling like hell part. I spent the first two days asking Joel if it had been four hours yet and when I could take more painkillers, although I stopped even bothering with the hydrocodone after day two because it did nothing but give me insomnia.  It certainly did not help that I simultaneously had a cold, and when I say cold, I mean one night I coughed so hard that I threw up.  In the bathroom sink, because I couldn't bend my knee enough to barf in the toilet.  So.  Yes.  That was both enjoyable and attractive, as you can imagine.

And on top of this whole pity party, I was bored out of my mind.  I reached the end of the Tivo cache and my Google reader on the same day and from that point things started getting desperate.  I absolutely love days at home by myself, but it turns out that's contingent on my being able to, like, do stuff.  Sitting around all day, getting absolutely nothing done (because I'm recovering, I tell myself!) is difficult for me.  It makes me grumpy.  I didn't start this post to complain about my tragic state of boredom.  I'm just saying, surgery: not as awesome as I thought it was going to be. 

What is awesome, however, is working from home.  People, it's got to be the most glorious thing on earth, the perfect balance of yoga pants, coffee and productivity.  Technically I'm still on sick leave, but I felt so guilty pushing all my work onto my coworkers -- especially just three months after I happily dumped a stack of work on their desks and took two and half weeks off to get married and go on a honeymoon -- that I brought my laptop home.  I'd normally be opposed to this -- if I'm using sick time, I should be devoting all efforts to sitting in bed with a cup of tea and a book -- but this has actually provided a perfect reprieve from the boredom and the guilt.  I'm still at home with my knee propped up, ice pack in place for twenty minutes every hour, but the anxiety that everyone at work is mad at me is gone.  I don't need to worry about all the things that might be going wrong in my absence.  I don't need to have a panic attack before starting up my email, wondering how many red-exclamation messages will be waiting for me.  Oh, internet, if only this were an option without having to have surgery first.  Do any of you get to work from home?  Is it as fantastic when you get to do it all the time?