Truth in False Depths

Last night's tweets;

This town makes me want a quesadilla.
I'm still drinking the same Dr. Pepper.
No-one solves a problem like Maria.
Croissants currently not in this sector.

I wasn't watching The Sound of Music, but the line fit and it kept up the Julie Andrews theme. Do tweets now influence life?

Twitter seems to be a bit buggy still--I've noticed a few of my tweets simply fail to post, and some tweets posted by people I'm following aren't showing up on my following list. I created my Twitter profile when Robyn Massachusetts invited me a year or two ago but Twitter only seems to have really exploded in the past couple months.

Just checking a moment ago, I see my following page has just utterly stopped posting tweets from the people I'm following. It'd be sort of exciting if the thing just sank to-day, if the fail whale were pulled down into the sea by a giant squid.

Gods, I miss the old submarine ride at Disneyland. The coolest part was where you dived to depths where light couldn't penetrate and saw a giant squid fighting a sperm whale. It always freaked me out when I was a kid--no haunted house could compare.

Last night I watched The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer with Rifftrax accompaniment. What an awful film. I remember seeing an interview with Jessica Alba on Dark Horizons where she was asked about the differences between working on the first Fantastic Four movie and Sin City and she said, of Fantastic Four, "It's very big and it's a huge movie for Fox and there's a lot of pressure that it does well. So it really couldn't be more different."

Rise of the Silver Surfer felt like it spent months going through a bureaucratic colon whose purpose was to smooth out any edge or trace of challenging material. It took the traditional story of superheroes torn between their desire for a normal life and the knowledge that their powers carry responsibility and takes it past the borders of mundane and beyond into vast, lifeless space. That the movie chooses to insult women by implying it's normal for Sue Storm to put her wedding at a higher priority than averting a danger to the lives of millions of people isn't particularly surprising, but that it also insults men by having Reed Richards feel shame for not agreeing with her takes the film to an extra stratosphere of phoney character motivations.

This is a movie about crossing and dotting nonexistent letters in the alphabet of the human soul. An awkward cut to Ben Grimm donning a hoodie during the climactic action sequence was so clearly there because someone said the audience would insist on knowing how Grimm got the hoodie when we saw him in later shots. Time was spent establishing dialogue between Johnny Storm and a young female military officer so perfunctorily and with a pay off so flaccid one wonders if the people behind the scenes even understand why people are ever interested in other people.

Obviously, I have my gripes about the Watchmen movie, but it was nice to see a film prove that a naked guy walking around isn't going to damage the souls of the viewing audience. Every time I saw the Silver Surfer's smooth crotch, it was like a sign that said, "Comic book fans are terrified of sex." Which I don't think is a fair statement. At least, I'd like to think it isn't.

Anyway, the Rifftrax was pretty funny.