why is there so much food here? do I look like i'm a family of 20?
The quote of the day:
Girlfriend can spell.
Running news:
None today.
4.1 yesterday.
We went to see Blade today, after having lunch at The Cheesecake Factory and doing a little light shopping in Pasadena. (That's "a teeny weeny bit of shopping," not "the house is dark and we need fixtures" shopping.)
A note on the Cheesecake Factory: they serve too goddamn much food. The regular size salads are bigger than your head--literally. Darin ordered a lunch-size salad and got one that was about the size of one of the serving bowls in our house.
I ordered the orange chicken--morsels of chicken in orange sauce on rice with vegetables--and knew that cutting the portion in half was still going to leave me with too much food.
"I know, I know--I'm having it for lunch tomorrow," Darin said.
"I think we're both having it for lunch tomorrow," I said.
"We'll invite people over for lunch tomorrow," he said.
You wonder why Americans are so huge? I looked around the room and most of the people in there had eaten most of what was on their plates.
We did not have dessert. I fear the size of the desserts there.
We hung around Fernando's office in Burbank for a little while--he was very busy at work, installing Office 98 on a bunch of machines--before going to the movie. Fernando did not come with, although we got the idea that he wouldn't have minded. People were calling him left and right with software problems; he was harried.
The movie: okay. I didn't hate myself for seeing it, and there were points I enjoyed. It had more plot than I expected (which was none). But all of this is damning it with faint praise, I guess: even now, I can barely remember it.
The best description of this movie I've heard is "a Hong Kong vampire movie," which is pretty accurate. If watching Wesley Snipes be a karate machine is your idea of a good time, this is the movie for you. There are some cool images, and Snipes may actually have enjoyed himself once or twice (since he walks around with a perpetual scowl, you'll never know).
Blade is half-human, half-vampire and all vampire hunter. He wants to get back at the guys who bit his mother and turned him into a quasi-vampire. He has his faithful sidekick Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) and he rescues a pretty doctor (N'Bushe Wright) from a vampire attack. Conveniently, the pretty doctor is a hematologist.
Stephen Dorff plays Frost, the bad guy who wants to take over the world by raising a vampire blood god, as though vampires weren't completely capable of the job by themselves. Evidently this blood god's going to make everyone on Earth a vampire, which seems to spell instant starvation for legions of bloodsuckers, but no one seems to care much about this detail of the master plan. Frost needs Blade to make the blood-god-raising spell work, so he can't kill Blade.
We're not dealing with Shakespeare here--or rather, we're not dealing with the Shakespeare of MacBeth; we're more on the level of the Shakespeare of Titus Andronicus.
Lots of martial arts scenes. The vampires tend to attack singly, rather than in groups--don't they know their rules of combat? Nice hardware.
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On the Well, discussions of Blade have brought up the possible subtext of the dichotomy between the vampire world and Blade's world--the vampires are the bloodsucking (ha, ha) capitalists, whereas Blade & Co. are more Marxist, dealing in barter and trade in kind. If I hadn't read this discussion, I wouldn't even have noticed these details, because the movie sure as heck doesn't do anything with them.
Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com