Weekend natterings and the return of the Tick.

Spent most of the weekend off the net, not always a bad thing.

Since we celebrated Father's Day when Elayna was still in town, yesterday was mostly uneventful on that front, other than a call from my daughter and the surprise that she'd hidden an extra Father's Day card under her keyboard for me before leaving town. Yeah, my kid rules. :-)

Played lots of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. I go back to it every year or two. Still so damned good (really -- I'd rather see action RPGs just try to improve on the few flaws in this formula than start from scratch). Got my sword-and-shield Barb to Lower Kurast.

After two weeks of waiting for a library recall notice to go through, I finally got my hands on the two most recent Kinsey Millhone books, and gobbled down Q is for Quarry, which was the best in a while (and, although I picked up a lot of the important early details, the first one that kept me in the dark about the murderer in a long time).

I also burned through about fifteen magazines that had piled up. And ate yummy food.

Oh, and the best news of all: So, after matociquala made a comment in her LJ involving the word "Denouement," I felt compelled to quote from the "Heroes" episode of The Tick. This led me to check the Tivo listings to see if it was on anywhere, and lo and behold, Toon Disney is running it every night at 11! I can get my spoony goodness again! And so can all of you!

Finally, anyone know of a good Mac client that handles tag support? I love my iJournal, but I also love tags, and hate editing more than I have to.

Woohoo!

Just called to schedule my annual physical, seeing as I'd last had one over a year ago. Figured I'd be stuck with August, given the usual delay, but they had a cancellation for this Friday!

(Oh, and this is an excuse to finally test Xjournal, since three of you recommended it this morning)

Now that's zombie comedy

Just got back from a screening of Land of the Dead.

Damn, that was fun.

Best movie in which a bunch of homicidal creatures led by a screaming guy named Big Daddy attack civilized people ever*.

You know the basic story: Marshall, Will, and Holly, routine expedition, waterfall, dinosaurs, Sleestacks, etc.

Erm. Well, Land of the Dead. Not Lost.

Overall (and keeping this spoiler-free, at least for anything beyond the first five minutes), it was damned good, and damned short. This clocked in at barely over an hour and a half. Compare that to seventeen hours for Day of the Dead, and you'll see that Romero's tightened up his pacing a little bit. Action-packed, but with traditional Romero zombies, who rely on stealth and persistence, not being able to run a 100-meter dash. And, of course, they're starting to get a little smarter, making them all the more scary. Less character development than in the last two, both a good and a bad thing. Part of the point of the world (explicitly addressed by Simon Baker's character) is that your life before the world went to hell doesn't matter anymore. Overall, no real script complaints, and considering how utterly un-fucking-readable Romero's last zombie project (the waste of paper known as Toe Tags), it's nice to see that he still has some interesting ideas.

Other notes:

Romero hasn't dropped the use of zombies as a class metaphor, this time extending the concepts only touched on in Day to their logical extremes. Some good stuff.

The casting hurt the movie a little bit. Not because anyone was bad - Leguizamo and Hopper, in particular, were a blast -- but given a group of people going on an expedition into zombie territory, it's hard to imagine that the top-billed folks are going to bite it first. This is particularly annoying with Asia Argento, who is first introduced in a scene in which she's supposed to be in mortal danger, but will clearly live because she's Asia Argento, the top-billed female. This is the first film in the series to use "name" actors, which is why it was a surprise.

The big revelation in this cast was Robert Joy, whose mentally-addled Charlie gets most of the best lines (the other ones going to Hopper's Kaufman and Pedro Miguel Arce's Pillsbury).

This was as funny as it was horrific. But it was a horror movie first. The comedy was gallows humor at its most extreme.

And yes, even with the R rating, lots of gore. I do, however, fully expect to see an unrated version on DVD with all the extra stuff that had to be cut.

Romero loses points for having a rat scare. That was beneath him.

And yes, Tom Savini's cameo is all but impossible to miss.

Overall, definitely worth seeing. I've got nothing against the hyperfast zombies of recent years, but it's nice to see the evolution of Romero's classic creatures.

*Granted, that's because Ghosts of Mars blew, and the zombie scenes in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were cut by the studio, but the movie was still good.