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Wrath of the Titans (Or, this movie sucks so much it will break your furnace)

Wrath of the Titans is a clunky inept sequel to a clunky inept remake of a clunky inept movie from the 1980s. Young Boomers/older Gen Xers, who thought the original Clash of the Titans was great because they were young and impressionable when it first came out (and were probably stoned when they saw it) are now the people green-lighting the big budget IMAX 3D reboots of movies that they would realize weren’t very good if they weren’t currently working as “Creatives” and consequently making business decisions while smoking pot.

The people who greenlit this movie also know two things. One, that the kids who are willing to shell out weekend box-office don’t comprehend, or care, that the original movie was Not Great. Two, GenXers will Netflix or purchase the reboot in a fit of pique and/or out of misguided nostalgia. What this means is this: lots of people will get paid.

Everybody wins.

Except us, because we’re watching it. Right. Now.

This movie, like all movies, co-stars Liam Neesen.

Seriously. What the hell?

I just watched The Haunting (1963), one of the all-time scariest movies of all time ever. I spotted the 1999 remake on HBOHD and, being too sick to think, decided to see if it was as bad as I remembered.

It was. Got a post about that drafted, you’ll have to wait for it a little longer – the relevant point here is that the remake starred Liam Neesen.

Husband decided to watch all the Star Wars movies. We watched 4, 5 and 6 over the holidays. But we know who’s in the the first 3: Liam Neeson.

Our Tivo, OverLord II, recorded Unknown for us. Never heard of it. Looked at the description. Liam Neeson.

The Netflix fairy sent Battleship. Liam Neeson.

The Dark Knight Rises? Liam Neeson.

Maybe the connection here isn’t “Liam Neeson.” Maybe it’s “our questionable movie selection judgement.”

I’ve been sick for 3 weeks. I don’t know what Husband’s excuse is. I guess that doesn’t explain the last 20some years of our movie watching co-existence, does it?

Moving on.

I guess I have to quit copying IMDB links for Liam Neeson movies and pay attention to the screen if I want to describe Wrath of the Titans to you. There aren’t any spoilers in here. To be fair, I think to have a movie spoiled you probably need to care about the outcome. Trust me, no one should care about the outcome of this movie.

Except Liam Neeson’s agent, who should probably wake up with a horse head in his bed or something. This dude has been in some shitty, shitty movies.

Wrath of the Titans. Wrath of the Titans is about Perseus and Zeus and a bunch of other Gods who lived back in the Ancient Greek Lack of Hygiene World.

Liam Neeson is Zeus. His half-human son, Perseus, has to rescue him from the underworld and

I just realized I’ve been sitting here trying to remember why the guy woke up with the horse head in his bed in the Godfather and I’ve forgotten what came next in that unfinished sentence you see above this paragraph. I fall asleep every time I try to watch the Godfather. I’ve seen the scene but I have no idea what it means. (What? It was before my time. Plus I was afraid of New Jersey as a kid so the Godfather isn’t really my thing. Sorry).

Back to Wrath of the Titans.

Perseus has Poseiden’s pitchfork. It’s a Magical God Pitchfork, which means that it glows orange whenever it’s near manure, I think. That describes the overall quality of the script for this movie, so the pitchfork glows a lot. Husband thinks it might be more complicated than that, but Husband had to get up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday and work all day and he’s had a few drinks so I don’t know that you should trust him.

Plus, he’s still really bitter about the whole midi-chlorians thing, which he seems to be holding Liam Neeson personally responsible for.

So, Perseus has the pitchfork and he goes off to find his Dad.

Perseus ends up in a cave with Bill Nighy, one of our favorite actors. Nighy performs a monologue from a one-man Off Broadway show. Or outtakes from Love Actually. I’m not really sure, but I think it must be one of those. Then he shows Perseus and Andromeda a shortcut to destroy the Underworld that seems to defeat the whole “I’m on an epic quest” story-arc.

Husband: “There’s a small thermal exhaust port right below the main port!”

Liam Neeson, incidentally, was in Love Actually.

Wait, what’s Andromeda doing there? When did she show up? Perseus rode off alone on his Pegasus. Then he fought a bunch of badly rendered monsters and then I think he flew around some more.

Whatever.

Sometimes the dialogue is hard to understand. The sound mixing is actually pretty good. To be honest, the biggest problem is that we keep yelling lines from other movies, which makes it hard for us to hear the movie we’re watching. Husband hasn’t seen Taken, and neither of us has seen Taken 2 or the forthcoming Taken 3: the Quickening, but all of the trailers look the same so it seems safe to just make up dialogue.

Seriously, how many movies can there be in the Someone Stole Liam Neeson’s Daughter franchise?

It’s possible I made Taken 3 up…but I bet it gets made.

Since Perseus gets around on a fast-flying Pegasus, I’m not really clear on how all the other characters seem to be able to keep up with him. Nevertheless, Pegasus and Perseus go flapping away and everyone they left behind is just somehow with them in the next scene.

Husband: “A small one-man fighter should be able to penetrate the outer defense!”

Hang on a second, there’s some kind of fire-monster warrior guys attacking our band of plucky morons. That’s sort of cool.

Honestly, I have no idea what’s happening.

Husband: “Get this big walking carpet out of my way.”

The tagline for Wrath of the Titans is “Feel the Wrath.” That’s the best they could do?

Anyway, Andromeda and Perseus are on an epic quest. At some point while I was trying to make up a joke about feeling the wrath a bunch of shit happened and now I’m confused about who’s fighting who or what the quest is. It seems to have changed.

I actually thought the movie was over because they’d gotten out of the Underworld and put on deodorant (I think that’s what they were doing. I might be mistaken). But now the people who I thought were mortal enemies are fighting on the same side and I can’t figure out who in the hell they’re fighting.

Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers summed it up when he wrote, “…Clash of the Titans sucketh the mighty big one.”

We aren’t even bothering to recite movie dialogue anymore, we’re just moaning and mumbling to ourselves. Husband just said something about his blast-shield being down, but, having realized that the credits are rolling and our servitude is over, we’re both too busy scrambling for the remote to think clearly.

post-script
After the movie ended I was giving this post a quick edit to remove eighty percent of the profanity while Husband stared at the blank TV screen looking, frankly, happier than he’d looked over the last 92 minutes. That was when our furnace – which is located in the basement – directly below the television – emitted a terrible sound.

Husband has been down there for the last 10 minutes trying to repair it enough that it will limp along until Monday. Mostly, we’d prefer not to pay Double Jeopardy Magical Super-Overtime, or whatever the rate is you have to pay for a furnace repair at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night in February. Honestly, I’m also a little afraid if we call the furnace company they’ll send Liam Neeson over. Or, the more likely scenario will occur: my cough medicine will take control of my mouth and I’ll just blurt out a request that they not to send Liam Neeson.

They probably don’t get a lot of out-of-the-blue requests to not have Liam Neeson dispatched to people’s homes. It actually wouldn’t be the craziest thing I’ve ever called and asked them. Still, cross your fingers that Husband’s repair gets us through. Just in case, we won’t be subjecting the furnace to any more bad movies this weekend. It’s all Downton Abbey from here on out.

Yeah. Right.

The Truelife Undead Adventures of GhostCat

Are you here looking for information about DC’s Demon Cat, who was alleged to prowl around the grounds of the White House and U.S. Capitol? You’re in the wrong place, but you might as well stick around because every day is Halloween around here and I have a ghost story for you all the same!

One day, while I was making some afternoon coffee, I looked out our kitchen window and saw the neighbor’s kids giggling and intently watching one of our upstairs windows. One of them waved up at the window. My office window. Since it wasn’t the window I was looking out, and I’m the only one home, that was a bit…unsettling.

I went outside to see what was up.

The kids told me they’d been watching our kitty sun itself in the window.

We don’t have a cat.

GhostCat Reenactment

I asked her if she could still see the kitty. Nope.

I asked her where the kitty went. She said the big orange cat got up, stretched, and hopped down off the window sill.

Creepy? Yes.

Surprising? Not really.

GhostCat apparently took up residence here in our house last year around Halloween. As one of the few houses in Alexandria, Virginia not claiming a ghost, I guess we were due.

I haven’t seen GhostCat myself and we’ve never owned an orange cat. Husband’s grandmother had a big orange cat, maybe it just took a while for him to find us? If cats can have ghosts and ghosts can sneak in to your house, we figure that’s how GhostCat got here.

You can’t prove it didn’t happen that way!

Our Official Ghost Cat Sightings began when JunglePete visited last Halloween. On the first morning, he mentioned that our cat walked over him a lot before finally settling in to sleep by his pillow.

We laughed at him, chalking it up to travel fatigue.

Since then, 3 little girls and one allegedly sober adult claim to have seen the big orange cat sitting in the window.

There are few things as creepy as watching someone wave and greet someone only they see, especially when you know there’s no one else in the house. And it’s always the same window – the window I have my back to when I work at my desk.

The window I have my back to right now.

Hang on a second, I need to nervously glance over my shoulder a few times.

Okay. I’m done.

Nope. One more time.

Okay, where was I?

Right. I’ve spent a lot of time standing in my yard at all times of the day trying to figure out what they could be seeing but there’s nothing there, and definitely nothing creating a reflection that looks either orange or feline. (We just tell little kids our kitty is very shy. My neighbors would kill me if I filled their kids heads with ideas about ghostly pet hauntings).

In light of the fact that one family turned their house into a haunted hospital last halloween and some guy wearing a clown costume was chasing people with a chainsaw, I don’t know why I’m concerned about inflicting psychological damage on the little ones. Yeah, sure, fine, that was Halloween and this…isn’t.

Maybe I should tell them we have a Cheshire Cat!

Recently, a friend and her adorable hound were visiting for the afternoon. Carolyn and I were knitting and watching a movie when the dog hopped up, ran across the room wagging her tail, and started behaving like she was trying to befriend another animal. She then trotted around the house with her new friend for about an hour. We both found the dog’s behavior terribly peculiar. The hound now runs around our house looking for her friend whenever she comes over, although even with her canine friends, GhostCat can be elusive.

I don’t know why it only just occurred to me that we should make a video of this behavior. I’ll keep you posted on that. I think we should also bring in another dog, one that hasn’t “met” GhostCat.

I’ll work on that.

Now that I think about it, ghostly pet eminences aren’t completely unknown in my family.

My uncle is apparently being haunted by my grandmother’s dog, a mastiff cross who, I suspect, could do some serious spectral damage. Do you think it’s possible to drown in ectoplasmic drool?

Blog this

If you’re a blogger, I bet your most popular post is the magical tale of the day you gave birth to your beautiful children. Or the lyrical paragraphs and heart-breakingly beautiful prose about the day that your future spouse sent Placido Domingo to your office to wish you happy birthday. Or maybe it’s the recipe for your great-grandmother’s traditional Arbor Day cake, which you’ve lovingly reconstructed with the help of your ancient relatives, who clung to their deathbeds waiting for that last bite that would determine if you’d finally figured out the right amount of vanilla (but only vanilla harvested by virgins and processed at 3 meters above sea level on the second night of the full moon in May).

Not mine. This is my most popular post of all-time.

Amazing Grace (Freak Magnetism, explained)

I am a Freak Magnet. This means I attract Freaks.

Non-Freak Magnets don’t understand this, and you can’t ever fully explain the depths of wackiness a Freak plumbs when they encounter a Magnet.

Freaks aren’t normal people who engage in small-talk while stuck in an interminable line, or ask you to help them find a contact lens, or ask you for the time while you’re on the Metro. A homeless dude who follows you down the the sidewalk and serenades you with “You Are So Beautiful” after you ignore him is annoying, but he’s not a Freak.

Freaks aren’t merely people who dress differently than the people around them or are clearly from another culture or profession or economic class than you. Those people can also be Freaks, but those states of being or actions alone do not necessarily a Freak make. The label “Freak” isn’t a judgement, per se, it’s more of a category. (A category that might best be defined as “people who have no sense of reality, believe they have a weekend home on Mars, and believe that the two of you inhabited the same physical form in a previous life.”)

For example, one day, long ago, I was on the bus on my way to work. I’m going to guess this was sometime in 2002 or 2003, because I was running into Jesus a lot back then.

Anyway, I was headed to the Pentagon Metro station – approximately a 20 minute ride. I don’t remember much about the day, but I do remember that the bus was really crowded and the weather was awful.

I was sitting on one of the bench seats along the side, wedged between two women.

One woman was sporting the stereotypical matronly 50something professional uniform: no-style haircut, St. John knit jacket, plain pumps with 1.5 inch heels. She was on the bus when I boarded. The other woman got on a few stops after me. She was neatly dressed in a pantsuit, probably navy blue, with a bulging briefcase wedged between her feet and something – probably an unopened book – in her hands.

Neither of these women spoke to me at any time. Neither of them threw glitter on me, wept openly at the beauty of my yellow aura, or attempted to fart the Star-Spangled Banner while insisting we all stand and place our hands over our hearts. (Coworker Who Was Not My Boyfriend and I used to call that guy “Captain Flatulence” – he was a Repeat Freak who one or both of us spotted on multiple occasions).

Both women were tidy. Neither of them smelled bad. Neither of them had marinated in perfume. Neither of them was purposely encroaching on my personal space.

Two boring women, riding the bus.

That sounds okay, doesn’t it?

It wasn’t.

I may have failed to mention that Pantsuit, after she got settled in her seat, then spent the entire ride staring at me. Directly. She was sitting next to me on the bench. Her body squarely faced the people on the bench across the aisle. Her head was turned so that she was staring directly into my ear. She never said a word. She just stared at me. For the whole ride, she stared at me. That could not have been comfortable for her. It certainly wasn’t comfortable for me.

About half-way to our destination, St. John started singing under in her breath in what could only charitably be called a monotone. I’m pretty sure she couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. That didn’t stop her.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.

She kept repeating that line. Apparently that was all she knew. She sang that part over and over for 10 minutes.

When we got off the bus one of the Military Dudes who’d been sitting across the aisle watching this in wonderment asked me how I kept my cool for the entire ride. (You don’t really think I’m all jiggy with the zen states from years of meditation, do you? Heavens no, I’ve honed my hyper-focal concentration skills on the battlefields otherwise known as “public transportation.” Also, possibly “staff meetings” and “starbucks.” Plus, there were the Deadheads).

The Other Military Dude chimed in and told him about the woman who used to take the bus with us who decided that Jesus and salmon would save one’s soul and proceeded to pull labels from cans of salmon and a bible out of her laptop case and present them to people she deemed worthy of redemption. I, of course, was one of those people – it was what brought me to his attention in the first place. He was impressed with my equanimity in the face of biblical ichthyology.

I don’t remember it going down that way, but whatever. What I most remember was that she was also carrying a Glock9 and going into the Pentagon and that was all I wanted to know.

Other Military Dude also knew about Captain Flatulence. I suspected Other Military Dude was also a Freak Magnet but I wasn’t in the mood to engage for long, just in case he was less Magnet, more Freak. He knew about Captain Flatulence, who he called Patriotic Farting Man, because he was often on blue line train with him in the evenings. Apparently, Captain Flatulence/Patriotic Farting Man, although far from his dream of mastering the Star-Spangled Banner, had recently performed stirring renditions of America the Beautiful and God Bless America.

It was good to know that Captain Flatulence had moved or changed jobs, which explained his disappearance from the yellow and red lines. It was good to know that other people were running into Jesus around town. It was good to know that my Freak Magnetism served as a form of both edification and entertainment for others. It was also good to know that the Military Dudes had my back on the bus.

Possum Dental Hygiene (was Tron & the Black Hole)

Recently, Husband and I viewed a double-feature of two of the greatest horror movies of all time, or at least from 1982/83. I’m speaking, of course, of Poltergeist and Flashdance. Somehow, we then got stuck in the early 80s and decided to watch Tron and the Black Hole.

If you haven’t seen Tron, I don’t think that you should care about spoilers because, let’s be honest, Tron is a dumbass movie.

You might remember it as a good movie, but you’d be wrong.

See, in the 1982 of Tron, when you wrote a computer program a miniature person drove around executing the program in a miniature car.

This reminded me of a creepy dental hygiene video I saw in elementary school. It apparently wasn’t Crest’s Cavity Creeps, but so far my YouTube searching for the video in this traumatic yet hazy memory has only turned up Cavity Creeps, porn, and opossums.

Do you remember the Cavity Creeps? The Cavity Creeps were creepy, but it was this other video that creeped me the fuck out. I still can’t find the other video, but I’m not done looking yet.

I can only assume that the devolution of this post indicates that it’s my destiny to post the 3rd opossum-care video before I get around to posting about the psychic damage inflicted by Tron and the Black Hole.

On a opossum-related sidenote, one night my whole neighborhood was awakened to the horrible scene of opossums ripping a squirrel’s nest apart in our yard.

The carnage was grotesque. There’s no way I’d brush the teeth of an opossum under any circumstances.

If you decide to brush an opossum’s teeth, more power to you.

Just remember the advice from the video and don’t use your own toothbrush.