So much for updating this blog every day (the Holidaily mandate--which, well, isn't really much of a mandate when you're doing "Holidailies at Home"). The weekend let any blogging get far and away from me.
Saturday was a good time. There were nine of us, in all, the first arriving around nine o'clock; and I think the last of our guests left around 3 a.m. We had a tree and everything. I clearly drank too much, but well, that's what "Milk and Cookies" is for. And we still have a full bar (plus) left over, so no worries.
Our apartment finally got around to washing and using the glass set that John had given us. It was very classy.
Sunday was a day for vegetating--after the liver-abuse of Saturday night/Sunday morning.
I was able to watch the first two episodes of Arrested Development but the third one is still glitching, so I'll probably have to wait on the torrent for a while. Actually, I was surprised that it let me watch the first two episodes anyway. Usually they're all finicky until the files are fully complete.
Then, I was obsessively checking mininova.org over and over again last night, because Torchwood's "Out of Time" aired at 9 p.m. on BBC Three, and factoring in whatever amount of time it takes for the creation of .avi and .... COFFEE TIME! ... Ahem. As I was saying before the coffee interlude, the episode availability of the torrent is always affected by the air time, the five hour time difference in the UK, plus the time it takes for the creation of the files and their torrents.
I ended up finding the new torrent at around 2130 ET and started it, but it was slow-going since nobody was really seeding it yet. This morning, however, it was going at up to 90 kbps and predicting 40 minutes to go (that was over two hours ago); so it'll probably be waiting for me when I get home. I love new episodes. Can't wait.
We also might be doing some Christmas shopping tonight, which is good since I still want to get a few people gifts.
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What's new with Netflix?
I received Hairspray on Friday and Highlander 2: The Renegade Edition on Saturday. Both of these movies are truly awful, but have some really funny moments and/or characters.
Divine, for one. Who is Divine? A man who chose to look like a very strange woman some of the time (or most of the time), and often worked with director John Waters. I love how (s)he was the mother and the crabby racist TV station owner in Hairspray--though I didn't really make the connection until one of the final scenes when the two characters are yelling at each other, and I noticed the peculiar similarity between their disturbing and unnaturally arching eye-brows.
And I know that Waters is from Baltimore, and that it's his cult-movie trademark to set all of his movies there, but ... Baltimore?
The movie inspired me to download Gene Pitney's "Town Without Pity" ... And, speaking of music downloads (while returning to a favourite subject), John Barrowman has a lot of musicals under his belt (among other things), so I took a lot of those too. And I'm tempted to rent De-lovely again (though I didn't like it very much), just to watch his duet with Kevin Kline on "Night and Day." Maybe I can find the clip on YouTube or something ...
And speaking of YouTube, musicals, and John Barrowman ...
I'm a big fan of that defabricator thing--you know, provided it's being used properly and on the proper people. I also love how he nakedly pulls that blaster out of, hmm, yes, nowhere.
As for Highlander 2, Sean Connery is really the only redeeming part of this movie. His scenes are the most entertaining in the entire film--which doesn't fit into Highlander canon (or reality) in any way. It just doesn't. I realize that complaining about lack of realism where this fandom is concerned is ridiculous to begin with, but they seem to break their own rules. Whereas before, there's some mysticism to the whole immortal business, in this movie they decide that these guys are actually aliens brought to Earth to battle it out until there's only one left.
Umm. Okay. So what about when Connor "died" in the Highlands in the first movie? Did he know he was an alien? Because I didn't get that impression at all. And if the flashbacks in H2 are meant to be after the historic events of the first movie, then why is Ramirez (Sean Connery) still alive? The alien crap just doesn't make sense.
Also, the "modern" setting of this film is 2024, wherin the Earth has been covered by a shield for twenty-five years to protect everyone from the sun's radiation. Only, as it turns out, the shield is completely unnecessary after twenty-five years--except that "there's no way of knowing!"
One, I'm pretty sure that solar radiation is easier to detect than this movie is leading its audience to believe; so the whole idea that "there's no way to be sure" is a load of tripe. Two, if the ozone layer became so depleted that people needed to put up a shield, it wouldn't revitalize in 25 years. It just wouldn't, especially if people kept burning fossil fuel under the shield. The problem wouldn't just happen to fix itself within a quarter of a century, not after thousands of years of damage.
Stupid premise. Stupid attempt at explaining the immortal thing. Poor-man's Jack Nicholson (Michael Ironside) as General Katana (Katana? Really?). Weird porcupine people. Huge deviations from canon.
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And this is the kind of entry you get from me after two days of nothing.
