Sinus revolt
I'm getting over a cold and don't feel like writing a real post. Therefore, I submit an oldie but goodie, and since it's a form job, I will supplement that with an advance review of "Final Destination 3." Not enough? Go and play this dandy Viking raid game.
A - Accent: Chicago (so I'm told), where I guess we say things like "I'm gonna go get a coupla sossidges"
B - Breakfast Item: Coffee n' milk
C - Chore you hate: Cleaning behind the toilet
D - Dad's Name: Robert
E - Essential everyday item: Drixoral 12-Hour Cold & Allergy
F - Flavor of ice cream: Moose Tracks
G - Gold or Silver: I don't wear either; I guess gold, so I can hawk it
H - Hometown: Palatine or Addison, depending on what "hometown" means
I - Insomnia: Recently subsided, replaced with occasional disturbing dreams
J - Job Title: Editorial Assistant
K - Kids: Got none, want none
L - Living arrangements: One-bedroom condo with fireplace and lots of closet space
M - Mom's birthplace: Chicago
N - Number of pets you have: Currently, zero
O - Overnight hospital stays: Just one, when I was about three or four years old, to get the tendons in my left foot readjusted
P - Phobias: Hairy spiders bigger than your fist, getting syrup on my sleeve while eating French toast
Q - Queer?: Am I? No, but Joe is
R - Religious Affiliation: Recovering Catholic - it's never out of your system entirely
S - Siblings: None that I'm aware of (I'm adopted, y'know)
T - Time you wake up: Between 7 and 8 on weekdays, 10 and noon on weekends
U - Unnatural hair colors you've worn: Magenta, purple, spring green, blue/forest green and a hideous peroxide-derived "turkey gravy" hue
V - Vegetables you refuse to eat: Lima beans
W - Worst habit: Employing honesty at the expense of diplomacy
X - X-rays you've had: They do my teeth at the dentist's, but I cannot recall the many others
Y - Yummy: Thora Birch and her fake accent in "The Hole", back before she got all bony and blonde... Keira Knightley's scrawny underage boobs really can't compete
Z - Zodiac sign: Leo
A - Accent: Chicago (so I'm told), where I guess we say things like "I'm gonna go get a coupla sossidges"
B - Breakfast Item: Coffee n' milk
C - Chore you hate: Cleaning behind the toilet
D - Dad's Name: Robert
E - Essential everyday item: Drixoral 12-Hour Cold & Allergy
F - Flavor of ice cream: Moose Tracks
G - Gold or Silver: I don't wear either; I guess gold, so I can hawk it
H - Hometown: Palatine or Addison, depending on what "hometown" means
I - Insomnia: Recently subsided, replaced with occasional disturbing dreams
J - Job Title: Editorial Assistant
K - Kids: Got none, want none
L - Living arrangements: One-bedroom condo with fireplace and lots of closet space
M - Mom's birthplace: Chicago
N - Number of pets you have: Currently, zero
O - Overnight hospital stays: Just one, when I was about three or four years old, to get the tendons in my left foot readjusted
P - Phobias: Hairy spiders bigger than your fist, getting syrup on my sleeve while eating French toast
Q - Queer?: Am I? No, but Joe is
R - Religious Affiliation: Recovering Catholic - it's never out of your system entirely
S - Siblings: None that I'm aware of (I'm adopted, y'know)
T - Time you wake up: Between 7 and 8 on weekdays, 10 and noon on weekends
U - Unnatural hair colors you've worn: Magenta, purple, spring green, blue/forest green and a hideous peroxide-derived "turkey gravy" hue
V - Vegetables you refuse to eat: Lima beans
W - Worst habit: Employing honesty at the expense of diplomacy
X - X-rays you've had: They do my teeth at the dentist's, but I cannot recall the many others
Y - Yummy: Thora Birch and her fake accent in "The Hole", back before she got all bony and blonde... Keira Knightley's scrawny underage boobs really can't compete
Z - Zodiac sign: Leo
posted by SoulReaper at 8:54 AM
6 Comments:
"Final Destination 3"
***
You can't cheat death, but some people just never learn.
In "Final Destination 3," another batch of folks manages to avoid a fatal accident, which peeves the ol' Grim Reaper into hunting them down with a ruthless grudge which would terrify even the most sullen Japanese ghost.
Series star Ali Larter is absent, as is - thankfully - the feel-good sense of human empowerment that declawed the concept in 2003's second film. What’s left is a near-remake of 2000's "Final Destination," and although that makes it a victim of diminishing returns, the movie has plenty of creative killings in store for fans.
It starts as we meet Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and her pals, living it up at their high school's senior carnival, where Wendy snaps pictures of the revelry for the yearbook.
Wendy's fellow seniors are, handily, your typical teen horror movie types. You've got the self-absorbed glamour princesses, the cranky goths, the overdriven jock, even the obnoxious jokester with the video camera.
Somehow, they all end up in line for the roller coaster. With its animated entrance and tons of corkscrews and loops, it's quite an elaborate ride for a mere carnival, but control freak Wendy is the only one who thinks something’s fishy.
She has a premonition that the ride will have an accident, which we see in a great white-knuckle sequence that easily lives up to the first film's plane crash and the second's highway pile-up. Tracks shudder, cars careen and bodies splatter with a gleeful, inexorable energy. This can't be reassuring to anyone with a natural fear of thrill rides.
It's so real to Wendy that she flips out while being seated. She and her seat-mate Kevin (Ryan Merriman, who appeared with Winstead in "The Ring Two") get booted from the ride, along with a few other students who get caught up in the scuffle. Of course, as security hauls them away, the ride does crash, killing everyone who stayed on the coaster, including Wendy's boyfriend and Kevin's girlfriend.
Death comes after the lucky survivors with what has become the series' hallmark: intricate, highly structured Grand Guignol set pieces where human error and mechanical mishaps combine to set off a disastrous chain reaction.
Here, too, "FD3" lives up to its predecessors, its drawn-out setups perhaps having even gorier ends than before. Exercise equipment, a runaway truck and an unattended nail gun each figure into the seemingly random sequences of disastrous events. (In a page cribbed from the "Nightmare on Elm Street" sequels, the princesses meet their ironic ends as they're roasted by haywire tanning beds.)
The main deviation from the other films' formula comes in Wendy's carnival pictures, which she discovers offer clues to how the marked students will snuff it. Explaining it to Kevin, she offers precedents such as the final portrait of Abraham Lincoln, where a cracked negative produced a line that seemingly foretold his assassin's bullet's trajectory, or a picture of the World Trade Center towers taken the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 which ominously reflects an airplane's shadow.
From these pictures of their classmates, they try to determine and thwart Death's design. Of course, none of the kids believe them, so an added element of tension comes from trying to spot the details that will do them in before Wendy and Kevin do.
"FD3" reteams writers James Wong and Glen Morgan, who won the hearts of genre fans with their scripts for "The X-Files" during its early, epochal years. Wong and Morgan made the first "Final Destination," which arrived amid the long post-"Scream" boom of sanitized stalk-and-slash retreads (see "Valentine" or "Wrong Turn" - or, better, don't).
That wave of bloodless clunkers so effectively lowered expectations for the original "Destination" that the movie seemed like a paragon of intelligence. And, in a way, it was. Its somber mood, nihilistic ending and refusal to cut away from carnage stood out among the cavalcade of designer shockers. It remains one of the best American horror movies in ages. (Tellingly, Wong and Morgan had nothing to do with the curiously pro-life "FD2.")
If you've seen the other two installments, you may find the concept doesn't pack the novel punch it once did. But who cares? Sequels rarely live up to the original, especially horror sequels. Within those parameters, "Final Destination 3" is a fun, mean thriller with plenty of gruesome ends.
I don't feel like I should like the "Final Destination" series, but I do.
It was much better than "Cats."
Many, many things are much better than "Cats." Including lima beans. I really think you should give them a second chance.
You should seriously rent out the space in your bedroom closet to a family of 4. A tiny family, but a family of 4 could fit comfortably in that closet. Or you could turn it into a bar! Or a karaoke lounge! Or a brooch! Or a pterodactyl!
You're supposed to clean behind toilets?
There's no reason not to like these movies, unless you really can't stand gore or something dumb like that. They're fun, relatively smart, and a trillion times more satisfying than the crap that passes for horror movies in America today. Your other choices are the spotty direct-to-video market (recent personal bad choice: "The Hazing"), underwhelming remakes (some morons are trying to do "Suspiria"!) or PG-13 swill like "The Skeleton Key" or "When A Stranger Calls" - coincidentally, also a remake.
I have given lima beans many chances, and while I generally like most beans, there's something about the lima that makes me gag. Sometimes, you just have to cut your losses.
You don't *have to* clean behind the throne, but as long as you're cleaning the rest of the room, you might as well. I've seen what can happen if you don't. An occasional look at my buddy Barry's bathroom is all I need to scrub mine with near-OCD regularity.
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