Okay, tragedy averted, everyone relax; I think the most important thing we can take away from this incident is this:
One student, Hongying Markowitz, compared the sound of the explosion to a “gunshot.”
Hongying Markowitz?
Most awesome cross-cultural name ever.
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TrackbackWe Watch Movies: Taken
The trailer sold me. In the maybe 3 minutes of scenes, they set the entire film.
No spoilers here.
Badass ex-CIA dude is making nice with his daughter. Daughter gets kidnapped. Badass ex-CIA dude does scary monotone soliloquy over phone to kidnapper. Kidnapper basically tells him to fuck off. Swift and mind numbing violence ensues.
See? No complicated relationship? No comedic element. Just badass ex-CIA dude kicking ass and taking names. A little gunplay, a little car chase, some hand to hand. Maybe a twist or two, but we’ve see this movie a couple of times now (I’m looking at you Man On Fire and Ronin) and sometimes I just want to be entertained.
Except…
Along the way to being entertained, I was a little let down. Don’t get me wrong, the bad guys were bad, the good guy was good. The car chases and fight scenes were about what I expected. Just not quite. It felt like the director was holding back and that there was soooo much more that they could have done. It felt conflicted – SPOILER ALERT There’s a tense scene with badass ex-CIA dude and an dirty official of a foreign intelligence agency. They’re at the dinner table. Foreign dude’s wife and kids are there but they don’t know that there’s a conflict. Ex-CIA dude needs information from foreign dude, but he’s not getting it. Things pop and ex-CIA dude shoots the wife. I mean he just turns and shoots the wife. It’s cold and effective and unexpected. I wanted more of that! But then we’d have scenes that just felt like there was more graphic content missing.
Over on calguns we were going back and forth on this and someone suggested that there was a European Directors version that filled in these missing scenes. I wasn’t so sure:
I wonder if there really *is* a Euro version. If there is and it’s more graphic, I’d be mad; hey man this is America, we INVENTED violence in movies. Heck we practically invented VIOLENCE.
Ok so maybe not invented it, but we’ve damn well almost perfected it.
And I let it go at that until this:
Come on man! Seriously?
Damn Europeans.
We’ll watch it again of course. Won’t feel right until we do.
Comments rss TrackbackSeriously, I’m warning you, this gave me the absolute jibblies.
One word: spiders.
Now normally, spiders don’t particularly freak me out – I’ll admit to a certain unease, especially in movies that feature hundreds of the little fuckers. Dude! There’s no way to fight them! Guns are useless, you need like, poison gas or a freaking’ flame thrower.
But the occasional spider in the house doesn’t send me quivering.
This story and the accompanying pictures did.
Mouse over the link for an hint of the horrors that await.
You’ve been warned.
Comments rss TrackbackThere is so much wrong in this article, I don’t even know where to begin.
Emphasis all mine.
Via the Burlingame Daily News
Woman faces two felonies, up to two years in prison
A United Airlines mechanic accused of sneaking a loaded handgun into a secure area of San Francisco International Airport pleaded no contest Thursday to two felonies, meaning she will face no more than two years in prison.
Traci Timothy Bracken, 55, had been looking at as many as eight years in prison over two charges: a possession of an illegal weapon count stemming from the February incident at SFO and an assault charge following a fight at a Pacifica bar.
Bracken, who lives in Pacifica, allegedly brought a handgun into the United maintenance facility where she works. Police later searched Bracken’s home and found an illegal AR-15 assault rifle, according to prosecutors.
Airport security personnel allegedly found the handgun in her backpack. Security guards were looking for brass knuckles that Bracken had brought to work a few days earlier and used to punch a cardboard box, according to her defense attorney, Randall Knox.
“She was upset over the way a co-worker was treating her – making comments for being transgender, making fun of her and being mean and spiteful – and she was venting,” Know said in April.
At the time, Bracken was already facing the assault charge for allegedly attacking a parole officer with a knife last year in a Pacifica bar.
Prosecutors have downplayed the seriousness of the incident at SFO.
“We didn’t have an explosive situation by any stretch,” Steve Wagstaffe, San Mateo County’s chief deputy district attorney, said at the time.
Airport spokesman Mike McCarron said Bracken never had access to the airfield at SFO.
Yay! Pacifica! Keeping it real!…weird.
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