No Puccini :[

But YES to Tchaikovsky!

Instead of going to see Madama Butterfly, Ying Ying and I went to see the Nutcracker (Yes, the ballet, with the dancing and the prancing and the pirouetting...).

[We're gonna go see Butterfly this Tuesday, though.]

Since I didn't know that the show was cheapskate enough to be held out in the open, I didn't dress for the occasion.

It was a night show, and it was one of those crazy-cold nights.

It was organised by the Australian Ballet School (SCHOOL, mind you, not COMPANY. I thought it was the COMPANY that was performing. No wonder the tickets weren't crazy expensive. Like $43 each concession). I mean, they did a wonderful job, but I woulda preferred to spend my money on the pros rather than the students.



[I did awfully well in my exams. Will brag blog about it in a few days 'cuz I need to get snapshots.]

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Puccini!!

In uni now. Will be heading down to the city to watch ZucchiniPuccini's Madama Butterfly, which, for the unitiated, is an opera. I'll blog more about it when I get back.

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WATCHMEN!

[YES, AGAIN!]

Yesterday was a FANTASTIC DAY(!!!!!!!) ‘cuz the new Watchmen trailer came out last night (got it on my iTunes), and I totally spazzed out. I think I actually spent an hour watching the thing over and over again.

[YES I’M A GEEK!!!]

Geeked out when The Comedian got thrown outta the window, geeked out when I saw (AND HEARD!) Rorschach, dropped jaw at how Patrick Wilson DID NOT LOOK AND SOUND LIKE PATRICK WILSON (can’t believe how much he actually LOOKED like Daniel Dreiberg IN THE COMICS!!!), SQUEEE’D when I saw the Watchmen photo being taken (excellent casting with Jeffrey Dean Morgan, by the way, he looks SO MUCH LIKE THE BLOODY FRIGGIN’ COMEDIAN!!), and GAWKED when Laurie turned and ran from the fire (which looked kinda fake by the way, but the cinematography was absolutely, ABSOLUTELY gorgeous for that bit). THEY EVEN HAD DAN’S DREAM SEQUENCE!! BOO-YEAH!!

*does chicken dance*

I don’t remember summa the lines, though; might be rewritten for the movie. Can’t wait to see Matt Frewer as Moloch; haven’t seen him in ages (Frewer, I mean, not Moloch).

AND I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE THE BACKSTORY ON RORSCHACH!!!

[I think I might be turning into one of those people who like typing in caps.]

Quibbles: Dr. Manhattan looks like Clive Owen (nothing wrong with that, but I thought he should be looking like Billy Crudup, who actually PLAYS the guy), Adrian Veidt doesn’t look blockheaded enough and, is it me, or is Zack Snyder a fan of awful Muse song? Seriously, he had Knights Of Cydonia for the 300 trailer (which turned Pamela off, by the way, and caused us to NOT see that movie in the theatres), and now this crap for the new Watchmen trailer. I’d be turned off if I didn’t love the comic.

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Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers

[Don’t read the summary on Wikipedia; it makes the book sound lousy.]

The Tommyknockers is in the vein of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where this lady, Bobbi, stumbles onto part of a spaceship, inadvertently lets out alien gas, and slowly turns herself and everyone else in town into the aliens that formerly piloted said crashed ship.

‘Tommyknocker’ is a term that the aliens adopted (based on whatever their hosts name them) from her friend Gard, our hero, who was randomly thinking about it when Bobbi named the aliens.

[Imagine if he were thinking about Butthead from Beavis and Butthead.]

Gard is the only one immune to the gas, because he has a metal plate in his head, souvenir of a skiing accident. As we go through the book, we find out that anybody with a large piece of/enough metal attached to their body can ward off the effects of the gas.

[Don’t mean they don’t die later, though.]

People who slowly turn Tommyknockers gain psychic abilities (kinda like a hive-mind, similar to the Borg, minus Alice Krige) and become electrical and electronical geniuses, inventing all sorts of weaponry (as long as they have batteries) from household items to drive off/kill outsiders late on in the book, including a huge Coke machine that runs around running people over (it WAS controlled by a Tommyknocker, who later died because Gard destroyed one of the weapons she was controlling, and the backlash of energy flowed back to her through her controls and made her brains explode).

Stephen King is a big fan of the exploding-head-and-brains routine.

As the townspeople gradually become more alien, they depend on the polluted town air for survival, as evidenced when two young Tommyknockers drive out to buy batteries and barely made it back, one dead, and the other one blinded.

In the end, with the ship finally unearthed, Gard makes it take off into space, sacrificing himself in the process. The rest of the Tommyknockers are rounded up, and they slowly dwindle and die away.

All in all, I loved it. The book scared the crap out of me. It's really quite refreshing to read this after the bore-fest that was Bag of Bones. I mean, it didn't suck, but it was really, really, REALLY slow in the beginning.

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UPDATE!!

And here is a flurry of updates (flurry of posts to come later):

Started work on Monday before last (yes, I finally got a JOB(E)!!), and Thursday morning, my key decided to be a putz and not work, so I was late for work for OVER AN HOUR!!

This is the first time my room locked me out.

Luckily no one really cared (I hope!) that I was late, so it was all kewl.

It’s really refreshing to be able to come home and NOT DO ANYTHING PRODUCTIVE. I mean, I’m not saying that I am so during semesters (‘cuz usually I’d be playing my games or watching YouTube when I’m supposed to be revising or doing my assignments.), but to be able to play games and watch YouTube when I’m not supposed to be doing ANYTHING…

Priceless.

I’m having Candy From A Stranger stuck in my head now. It’s said to be a track on Britney Spears’ Circus album, but Wikipedia isn’t saying so. Anyway, there’s a debate in YouTube (over on Comments) that the song was actually sung by one of her backup singers, Myah Marie. The guy singing kinda blows, though. One comment noted that he sounds like someone’s squeezing his balls or something.

Balls squeezed or no, he sounds like a pedo. But that’s kinda what the song was trying to convey, I guess.

Candy will always symbolize Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers for me, since I was reading it while having the song on repeat. Normally I don’t read in my room (I read on the can, actually), but I had gotten to a good part a little while back, and couldn’t stop, so I continued on in my room.

Song + Book totally scared the crap out of me. And yes, I’m a dunce.

Had nasi friggin’ lemak yesterday (fuck yeah!), which set me back $13.30. Convert it, and it’s RM 40. Curry was lovely, but it wasn’t really worth it for RM 40.

Sigh. The money I spend for mediocre Malaysian food.

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Max friggin' Payne (2008)

I didn't even know the movie was coming out this year till I chanced upon the trailer on YouTube. Being the uber-geek that I am, anything involving cool action and computer games and special effects just does it for me. Anyway, the movie is based on the awesome game that allowed players to use 'bullet time' for just about anything (although it takes a while to recharge). I heard from a LOT of people that the movie sucks ass, probably because it's more of a 'loosely-based' version rather than a direct adaptation. Now, I've only played bits of the game, so that's probably why I didn't hate it so much.

*spoilers*

Our hero is a cop. His wife and kid gets slaughtered one day, and so he's currently in the Cold Case department, trying to find any link that could lead to the killer. While investigating, this Russian chick gets murdered, and with Max's wallet (and ID) found beside her, he's on the run from the cops, while trying to find out who framed him.

As the movie progresses, Max finds out that there is a super-drug hawked on the streets, called Valkyr, which, when consumed, causes the taker to see tons of flying demons and stuffs called Valkyries.

[Now, I always thought that Valkyries were fat Viking ladies sitting on tiny horses that could fly.]

So anyway, after a murder attempt by his best friend BB (who, as it turns out, was the one who dealt the final blow on his wife), Max takes the drug to prevent hypothermia, since he just climbed out of freezing water.

[Cue cool special effects and flying things reminiscent of Constantine.]

He goes on a rampage, and finally corners BB (up on the HELIPAD!!) and kills him. Then the SWAT team comes and arrests him.

Yes. That is how the movie ends.

I couldn't help but grin when they showed the scene with the helipad, since the game ends with Max M16-ing (well, that's how I did it) the antenna tower so that it falls onto the helicopter (which was MIA in this movie. Well, there WAS one, but not the one I'm referring to).

And ALL of the bits that I played (the kitchen fire scene, the mansion scene, the muffin' ELEVATOR-LASER SCENE, and the ENDING!!!), were not in the friggin' movie.

Visually, I thought the movie was great. I liked the flying things, especially this scene where the drug made this junkie feel like he was being pulled out of the literal hole-in-the-wall by a winged demon, when actually, it wasn't.

Ryan was right, though. They only had ONE bullet-time scene (for a movie adaptation of a game requiring skills on diving-sideways-and-shooting-at-baddies), which they did WRONG ('cuz no diving hahaha), but I still thought it looked cool.

Being an expert at missing after-credits scenes, I'm gonna go see it again when I go back.

Like the fan-girl that I am, I got totally excited when I saw the trailer for Watchmen, even though I've seen the damned thing a million times already (the trailer, not the movie). Trailer doesn't promise much, but the comic was AWESOME! (Graphic novel, schmaphic novel. Still comics to me.)

March 6th is so far away... Can't wait!!

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And the next PotUS is...

Barack Obama!!

And history is made. Congratulations.


[Being NOT American, this has absolutely nothing to do with me, I'm still excited anyways.]

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