Holy crap, a vampire movie that actually looks good:


Also: 300. In space. With Samurai.

Because it was decided that this would be interesting:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have seen.
2) Italicize those you intend to watch.
3) Underline the movies you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ. Why? Because.
The AFI 100 years... 100 movies list.
1.     Citizen Kane (1941)
2.     Casablanca (1942)
3.     The Godfather (1972)
4.     Gone with the Wind (1939)
5.     Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
6.     The Wizard of Oz (1939)
7.     The Graduate (1967)
8.     On the Waterfront (1954)
9.     Schindler's List (1993)
10.     Singin' in the Rain (1952)
11.     It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
12.     Sunset Boulevard (1950)
13.     The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
14.     Some Like It Hot (1959)
15.     Star Wars (1977)
16.     All About Eve (1950)
17.     The African Queen (1951)
18.     Psycho (1960)
19.     Chinatown (1974)
20.     One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
21.     The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
22.     2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
23.     The Maltese Falcon (1941)
24.     Raging Bull (1980)
25.     E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
26.     Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
27.     Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
28.     Apocalypse Now (1979)
29.     Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
30.     The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
31.     Annie Hall (1977)
32.     The Godfather Part II (1974)
33.     High Noon (1952)
34.     To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
35.     It Happened One Night (1934)
36.     Midnight Cowboy (1969)
37.     The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
38.     Double Indemnity (1944)
39.     Doctor Zhivago (1965)
40.     North by Northwest (1959)
41.     West Side Story (1961)
42.     Rear Window (1954)
43.     King Kong (1933)
44.     The Birth of a Nation (1915)
45.     A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
46.     A Clockwork Orange (1971)
47.     Taxi Driver (1976)
48.     Jaws (1975)
49.     Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
50.     Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
51.     The Philadelphia Story (1940)
52.     From Here to Eternity (1953)
53.     Amadeus (1984)
54.     All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
55.     The Sound of Music (1965)
56.     MASH (1970)
57.     The Third Man (1949)
58.     Fantasia (1940)
59.     Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
60.     Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
61.     Vertigo (1958)
62.     Tootsie (1982)
63.     Stagecoach (1939)
64.     Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
65.     The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
66.     Network (1976)
67.     The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
68.     An American in Paris (1951)
69.     Shane (1953)
70.     The French Connection (1971)
71.     Forrest Gump (1994)
72.     Ben-Hur (1959)
73.     Wuthering Heights (1939)
74.     The Gold Rush (1925)
75.     Dances with Wolves (1990)
76.     City Lights (1931)
77.     American Graffiti (1973)
78.     Rocky (1976)
79.     The Deer Hunter (1978)    
80.     The Wild Bunch (1969)
81.     Modern Times (1936)
82.     Giant (1956)
83.     Platoon (1986)
84.     Fargo (1996)
85.     Duck Soup (1933)
86.     Mutiny on the Bounty
87.     Frankenstein (1931)
88.     Easy Rider (1969)
89.     Patton (1970)
90.     The Jazz Singer (1927)    
91.     My Fair Lady (1964)
92.     A Place in the Sun (1951)
93.     The Apartment (1960)
94.     Goodfellas (1990)
95.     Pulp Fiction (1994)
96.     The Searchers (1956)
97.     Bringing Up Baby (1938)
98.     Unforgiven (1992)
99.     Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)
100.     Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

Top ten movies; note that, like Sean, these are on the basis of movies I find "fairly awesome" and are not necessarily an indicator of the quality of cinematography.

For that matter, this may not even be the appropriate order in terms of enjoyment.

Casablanca
The Big Sleep
Yojimbo
The Hunt For Red October
Fight Club
Batman Begins
Brick
Stranger Than Fiction
Equilibrium
Gattica

So. They're making a movie of Neuromancer, one of the most influential pieces of SF writing ever.

And who do they get to direct it?

The guy who butchered another super-influential work of SF, Starship Troopers.

Sing, O muse, of the rage of an indignant nerd.

So. This snowstorm that's supposed to obliterate the midwest is here. So far, reality has not ceased to exist for me, and I am not surrounded by unending whiteness as far as the eye can see, indeed, some of it is now sludgy-melty-snow-on-road-brown... But I have been open for an hour and a half, and have seen only two people,and the guy from another store that was supposed to be here-- so I'm not running the store by myself while the manager is on vacation-- didn't show up... *sigh*

I'm bored! There's nothing to do!

Well, I suppose I could do paperwork. There's a small pile of receipts sitting about six inches from the keyboard that needs to be sorted and filed. That will consume about ten minutes, including the time it takes to print the electronic journal stuff that needs to be printed up for the daily report. I also have a book, Accelerando by Charles Stross, that I can read. However, I am on page 100 or so, and it is only 415 pages long.

I read about four hundred words a minute. 315 pages left in a novel may not get me through the day if I am uninterrupted until 3:30 when my coworker comes in.

The snow is coming down a bit heavier now; not a white out, but if it gets much harder, it will be.

*sigh* I suppose I should go work on the daily report.

Interesting note on Cyberpunk SF: I am not a huge fan of William Gibson-style cyberpunk, preferring Bruce Sterling's Schizmatrix to, say, Neuromancer. However.... I find that comparing Accelerando to Neuromancer is much like having a Budweiser after drinking a Guinness. It seems thin and watered down.

Gibson-style cyberpunk seems to be rooted in the Cold War; the paranoia of a time when to superpowers were staring at each other over the fuselage of an ICBM (Rather than the barrel of a gun) seems to be inherent in it.

Schizmatrix is more my kind of thing, a sort of Space Opera/Cyberpunk hybrid.

We all, of course, know how I feel about Space Opera. There is a section of my book shelf dedicated to a Space Opera shrine; I have perpetually lit candles surrounding a model rocket, a copy of Dan Simmon's Hyperion and John C. Wright's The Golden Age.

I exaggerate greatly. But Space Opera makes Josh go "Squee!", potentially in a high pitched teenage girl sort of way, rather than the usual monotone, laid-back Josh sort of way. It's why Battlestar Galactica makes me so happy; it's good Space Opera. It works on every level; I care about the characters. I care about the plot. I am thrilled by the combat and ticked by Kara and Lee's betrayals of their spouses. (Not to say it is perfect; lately episode resolutions have been a little overly neat.) But on the Grand Scale of Good Stories in a Visual, Noninteractive Medium, it ranks along side Macross and Firefly for quality.

Hmm.
Casablanca. Seven Samurai.
Rah Xephon. The Big Sleep.
Macross. Battlestar Galactica. Firefly.
Lost.

No. I'm not gonna bother trying to actually compile the Grand Scale. It's too emphemeral, too easy to say "Today, I am in a Lost mood and not a Casablanca mood."

A Battlestar side note: the funny thing is, the characters I am most attached to are not, say, Apollo and Starbuck, or Helo and Sharon, but Admiral Adama and President Roslin. Out of all the characters in the show, they are the ones I care most for. Odd that I should identify with two characters my parent's age rather than ones my age.

First off, I keep a blog because it's the only frigging way I'll ever keep a journal. I feel like an idiot writing something no one will ever read. My attempts at keeping traditional journals fizzle after about three words, because I feel like a complete and total moron. I do not have a blog so that I can be tormented about it, understand? Spending an hour and a half at dinner being harassed for an entry is not my idea of a fun evening, never has been, and never will be. Keep that in mind for future outings, mmkay? Believe it or not, things bother me sometimes.

Secondly, I am extremely, extremely insulted by the insinuations that I am incapable of liking anything that is not science fiction. Extremely. I am not that close minded and I am not that empty headed, so you can take those comments and shove them.

Comments like "I knew Young wouldn't like it!" rank just behind the "Young doesn't like it because it doesn't have robots." comments on the "Let's piss off Josh" scale.

You people know I like SF and you know I like noir. You know I don't like stupid comedies. Except, oh, wait... I hate most of the Star Trek universe, I think the Maltese Falcon is incredibly overrated, and I laughed during Dude, Where's My Car? I laughed a lot.

You don't know what I will and will not like. Comments like the ones hurled at me tonight are like telling a musician that she won't like a piece of music because it's not Bach. Wait, I'm probably doing most SF too much justice. Because it's not Linkin Park, some other genre group they find enjoyable. It's like telling a cook that he hates a dish just because it's not primarily constructed out of bacon. Just because what I enjoy most is SF doesn't mean that's all I enjoy. I spent a good majority of my childhood being pestered about my obsession with SF, and I don't need that dredged up again, alright? I like a wider variety of genres than most of you have ever even heard of.

If you want to know why I didn't enjoy pirates, why I didn't spend the evening oohing and ahhing, laughing and crying try listening to the damn words that come out of my mouth when you ask me what I thought of it, ok? I felt it was choppy. I felt it lacked cohesion. There was next to nothing in the way of a narrative thread through the first half of the movie, and I felt like I was missing a hell of a lot of material in between the first and the second. Neccesarry material. I felt like I had missed a whole damn movie. Furthermore, what made me laugh in the original, and what has almost always been the main thing that makes me laugh, was not present in this one, at least not very much. I loved Jack Sparrow's speech; he was full of linguistic jokes that genuinely amused me. I can remember.... laughing at something he said in this one twice, and I can only remember what one of them was. "An undead monkey. Should be payment enough."

Yeah, I know. I'm weird. I'm so far off base and so absorbed into my little genre-ed corner of the literary world that I can't appreciate anything else.

I frigging hate slapstick. I can't stand it. Physical humor leaves me cringing, with the one glaring exception of Rat Race; I find it painful to watch. I cannot stand Laurel and Hardy, and I loathe the Three Stooges. Incidentally, and this might help explain part of my stoicism during Pirates II, I felt most of the humor in it relied on physical, slapstick-esque comedy.

Words amuse me. Conversely, words can also annoy the hell out of me. Who's on third? I don't give a f.... an ef. Nor do I care that you remind me of the man. Those particular jokes, and ones like it, are on the order of linguistic slapstick.

My conclusion? If any of you care and don't just want to shout it down? I'll go see the inevitable Pirates III. I didn't hate this movie, but no one seems interested in letting me talk, except for perhaps Nate, and he's all pissed off at my last journal entry.

Maybe I should just lock the damn thing from now on.

(Title censored for the sensitive.)

Your name alone strikes fear into others; but maybe, just maybe, there's a little vulnerability and weakness beneath that stoic, fierce exterior of yours. Take the What Pulp Fiction Character Are You? quiz.

Greaaaat. You will not find me anywhere near that scene, so help me God. If you've seen Pulp Fiction, you know what I'm talking about.

I wanna watch Pulp Fiction now.

So. Today. Japanese, as usual. Ok day, but I frigging hate katakana. I can read the symbols, but supagedi doesn't really click into my head as "spaghetti." *sigh* As I told Yagi-sensei, "Sumimasen... Wakarimasu kedo, wakarimasen...." I understand, but I don't. Meh.

So, I get home, avoid the new door knob that is falling apart after a month, and write two pages of a short story. ("Binary Boys"). Decide to use today as a cheat day for my diet, and make some mac and cheese and garlic bread. Throw some clothes in the wash. Finish making the food, and settle down in front of my TV and pop in Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. Yojimbo, incidentally, is the best movie I've seen in ages. Give it a rent if you're not afraid of subtitles or 1950's black and white films.

At any rate, I sit down, and notice that the washer has stopped. I think, wow, that's quick, so I go down to switch the load into the dryer. I reach in, pick up a single t-shirt.... which weighs five pounds and has about a gallon of water streaming out of it and back into the sock and soap soup. The washer is not draining.

Furthermore, it is no longer turning on.

Well, crap, I broke the washer.

I am frantic.

So I begin dismantling the washer, looking for a fuse, which seems to be hidden inside a spacefold in the washer, or perhaps doesn't exist in our dimension at all. No fuse. So, in a streak of inspiration, I wonder if there is a clog somewhere preventing the washer from draining, and perhaps a safety preventing the washer from turning on to do anything but drain if it is full of water. So I remove the drain hose, which is indeed clogged, and I am suddenly standing in an inch or so of linty, dirty, soapy water, which is now frantically gushing out of the machine.

Put the hose on, and test the machine. It turns on. It fills. It drains. When it drains, it sprays water all over-- the drain hose isn't tight enough. Urgh. Retighten it, throw my laundry back in, and start the cycle again. (I had tossed the clothing on the floor while I was working on the thing, and so needed to rewash it.)

Sit down to watch Yojimbo again. Munch down happily on my non-diet food. Toshiro Mifune is kicking butt and being frigging awesome.

*twitch* The washer has stopped.

Again.

And, for the second time in one day, I find myself standing in dirty water, trying to clean lint out of the drain hose.

So, my aunt comes home, and she asks me if the door knob can be fixed. I look at the knob, look at the piece that's fallen off, and decide to remove the lock assembly from the door to get a better look at it.

It falls apart in my hands.

Soooo.... Yeah. Cap this off by dying five times in a row inside a Silithid Hive in Wow because the other frigging druid can't heal for crap. "Go cat form!" he says. "I'm a pure restoration druid, and you're a restoration-feral hybrid. I'll be a better healer, you do DPS.(Damage Per Second. The term for heavy damaging classes. In cat form, druids are DPS.) I'll keep you covered."

Sooo. What happens? Josh looks at the other druid. Other druid is wearing Stormrage Equipment, which indicates that he's been doing difficult 40-man dungeons, which means he must have a degree of skill in what he does. And he's sunk all fifty talent points in to resto, I've only got thirty-eight.

That guy cannot heal for crap. Death to incompetent players.