December 10, 2000

One year ago: Musings on Medusa. Now that I have some layers in the bottom of my hair, I don't have the Medusa thing so much. I think my stylist cut too many layers last time though -- I notice that I'm kind of sporting the 1996 Rachel 'do lately. Oh well, it'll grow out. Last week when she cut my hair, we noticed that it was really curly, so she blew it dry with a diffuser and suddenly it looked like I had a perm or something. Who knew my hair was so naturally curly?

Here's my ceramic tree surrounded by all my winter-themed snowglobes. Since I haven't been doing much that is interesting lately (and I'm sure you are all bored with reading about how I sat around, wrote some stuff, and surfed the web), I thought I would write about some movies that I watched recently. I'm too lazy to do a full-fledged review for that (dusty, long abandoned) section of my own site, so I'll just write a paragraph or so about them here. Enjoy!

Chasing Amy: Jim and I rented this on DVD this past weekend. We have both seen the movie, and enjoy Kevin Smith's work a great deal, so we were looking forward to checking out the DVD extras. We watched the movie with the commentary track on. Providing commentary were Kevin Smith, Ben Affleck, Jay Mewes and some other guys who didn't say much. It was mostly Ben ripping on Kevin's directorial style, and Kevin ripping on Ben's acting "skills", which was pretty amusing. I didn't learn much about film making (as some other commentary tracks do) but Ben Affleck is pretty funny. The movie itself was made better by the commentary, I think, because some of my doubts about the directions the film took were dispelled by Kevin Smith's comments. Also included in the extras were some deleted scenes and some outtakes, each with a seperate introduction by some of the people involved in the commentary. If you are a fan of Smith's films, this one is worth checking out.

This picture is my ever-growing Dickens Village collection. My mom started the collection by buying the house on the far right of the picture for Christmas last year. Mary bought me the house on the far left (Grapes Inn) for my birthday. The others I bought for myself. I wish I could make a whole scene with the fake snow, but right now I don't have anywhere to put it where the cats can't get at it and track it all over. Plus, I'm afraid they'd try to eat it.

Southie: This movie was on one of the five HBO channels I get with my digital cable. It stars Donny Wahlberg (yes, the NKOTB/Sixth Sense Wahlberg), Rose McGowan, and Anne Meara. Well, those are the people you would probably know. Donny plays Danny Quinn, a kid from South Boston, who left the city when he started to get in over his head in terms of drinking and criminal activity. He comes home for a friend's wedding, and tries to save his two brothers and sister Kathy (Rose McGowan), and take care of his mother (Anne Meara). This was actually a decent movie. I started watching out of sheer boredom, but ended up getting sucked in. Except, the whole time I kept thinking about David from Real World: Seattle, because of the accents. Anyway, it was kind of a low-rent Sopranos in a way. There are worse things to watch when it's 1 AM and you can't sleep.

Mallrats: Continuing the Kevin Smith theme, Jim and I rented this DVD from Netflix, an online DVD rental service we are testing out. Again, we watched it with the audio commentary on. It wasn't as funny as Chasing Amy, but I think that's because the movie is not as good. Kevin Smith spends a lot of time ripping on himself about how poorly the movie did at the box office. It has some funny moments, though. Jay Mewes manages to stay awake throughout, which is more than he did in any of the other commentary tracks I've heard. The movie itself is basically a star vehicle for Jason Lee, if you haven't seen it. Anytime he's not on screen, it just drags. I mean, Jeremy London? Please. He's terrible. It's also kind of interesting to watch the deleted scenes and see how the movie was originally planned, what was changed and why. Basically, they had a whole different opening for the film, and then were forced to scrap it. This meant they had to go through and change a bunch of scenes throughout the film which referred to events from the scrapped opening. I definitely think this is the worst of Smith's films that I've seen, but it's still amusing. I love when Jay yells to Silent Bob, "Fly, fatass! Fly!" I think that's my personal motto now.