Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Wednesday, February 6, 2002
21:08 - On the Subject of Stupid People...	(top)
The movie I saw last night was Le Pacte des Loups-- that is, The Brotherhood of the Wolf. A French movie, as if that weren't seriously obvious from the title and the fact that the actors all had French names. It was really fun, all things considered. Well, maybe not fun per se-- maybe impressive is a better word. This movie had everything! French kung-fu, werewolf drama, gothic creepiness, period costumery and idiom, big swords in designs I've never seen before (a thwacky one that slings into a barbed chain like a Chinese yo-yo), sex, historical context-- yeah, everything. Even bullet-time and Matrix effects. It's those bullet-time effects that I think are nearing the end of their popularity, now that I mention it. Lots of the fighting scenes in Loups cuts fairly gratuitously to slow-motion camera rotations, sometimes with a smooth transition, usually sharply. Yeah, it looks pretty cool, it gives you a better idea of what's going on, and it means you don't have to shoot quite so much actual fighting to fill up the footage-- but darn it, it's getting old. I didn't mind seeing the spoofs of the Matrix bullet-dodging scene in that Atari-retrospective QuickTime movie and Conker's Bad Fur Day, or the bullet-time spoofery in Shrek or the genuine uses of it in every Jet Li film since 1998, but now that Kung Pow is coming out (and telegraphing the fact that it's going to be doing Yet Another Matrix Spoof Scene in the trailers), I think it means the era is ending. We'll look back and consider Crouching Tiger to be the pinnacle of the use of the technique: subtle, effective, smooth. But at any rate-- about half an hour into Loups, I had my shoulder tapped. I turned around to find a large guy in a t-shirt; big, angry-looking, thick-moustached, like the guy playing Barliman Butterbur in Lord of the Rings-- except looking considerably more put out. "'Scuse me," he growls. "Do you know if the whole movie's gonna be this way?" Meaning, I understood, the French dialogue with subtitles. "Well, yeah," I say. "It's French." He sits back in his seat with a harrumph. About one minute later, I hear his seat creaking, and he sidles out and trundles down the stadium-seating stairs, grumbling and swearing to himself. I'd love it if I could be the type of person with the mental powers to feel sympathy for these kinds of people, I really do. But when it becomes so obvious that the things they get angry about are so trivial and easy to work around, as with this guy or Hiker's bus lady or the couple in the taqueria, and that they're getting angry purely because they're unwilling to admit that they made an error in judgment or just a slight wrong turn and it is not the world's fault for not turning on its heels to cater to the actions they happen to have taken... well, I just don't have it in me to do anything but extend my tongue, hold up my nose so my nostrils are visible, and go "Thhppbbtllltlttpppt!" When Kris and Chris and I were walking back from lunch one day a few weeks ago, down the left-hand side of De Anza Blvd., we were passed by a college-age kid on a bike. He was barreling down the bike lane on the wrong side of the road, right under sign after sign saying "BIKES USE OTHER SIDE". He came very close to colliding with us from behind on the sidewalk. We'd barely had time to realize what had happened before the guy, now in front of us, shot out from behind a hedge just where a car was pulling out onto De Anza. He swerved in behind the car, regained his balance, turned and started yelling and swearing at the car. Chris, an avid bicyclist, had regained his presence of mind by now: "Try riding on the right side of the road!" And the guy responds, still shakily getting his balance, with a middle finger tossed over his shoulder. Chris cheerfully replies, "Yeah, same to you!" It's that end bit that I wish I'd been able to punctuate with something really stinging. Because watching that idiot pedaling off into the distance, head still shaking with unheard oaths, we all wished simultaneously for there to be some kind of cosmic come-uppance for pure willful idiocy. Not some kind of pansy best-revenge-is-living-well garbage. We're talking about lightning bolts from heaven, or light poles falling across the bike lane at just the right time, or just one blessed moment of Jhonen Vasquez-style head-explodey power.