Paul has received some kind of Awesome injection at the Comic Clinic, and the rest of this continuity is going to play out in a way that is sure to amuse you.
My bi-national transplantation is complete, and I'm told I have a low probability of developing Graft vs. Host Disease. There really is no succinct way to describe the radical alteration of my day-to-day life, having moved from Lexington, KY, to downtown Los Angeles. Some of you may remember my earlier excursion to the West, where I was confined mostly to the Santa Monica area with no car.
My feline companion, who made the trans-continental journey with me, seems to have forgiven me for keeping her drugged and captive in a car for three days. The vet told me that a mere quarter of a pill would keep her sedated for at least 8 hours. This was clearly a lie, and she must garner a certain kind of sick pleasure knowing that long-distance travelers with pets will be tormented by anguished howls of animals that they love.
My work, along with the move, has kept most of me from all of you, and for that I apologize. But we're through the night now, and I will be re-asserting myself in these posts thrice weekly.
I'm going to talk about Inglorious Basterds for the next few paragraphs. If you want none of that, then move along.
The movie was good. It's better than anything I've seen this year. But it occurred to me, at various points throughout the film, that Quentin Tarantino may have reached the point where he's been Quentin Tarantino for too fucking long. Because of this state of being, he's able to get away with things for which other, lesser filmmakers would have been criticized. I don't feel it's spoiling anything to say that putting his name on the movie was redundant; we would have figured it out anyway.
The most obvious problem with the movie is that it's set in Nazi-occupied France in the mid-1940's, a time and place in which very few people spoke English in casual conversation. As a direct result, more than 3/4 of the dialogue is subtitled French or German. This isn't a complaint about having to read subtitles; more to the point, it's that Tarantino's dialogue is best heard and not seen, rather than the other way around.
It will also make the movie harder to pirate, as subtitles are difficult to rip off DVDs. Maybe that was a selling point for the distributors.
I'm going to see District 9 tonight. I will let you know if it's worth your investment.
