Supermediocre

Superbad did not live up to Trailer Park MC Chris' recommendation, but it has its moments. This is one of those films which, while you are watching it you suspect the continuity editor was smoking something on the job, but by the closing credits you realize it was the director and the writers. At its heart this is a touching story about two mis-matched high school boys who are best friends. Unfortunately, on the surface the film is an over the top rip-off of every Bad Boys Party film ever made. Plus Reno 911. The stupidly crazy bad cops subplot is way over the top, way too long and way too "who cares?". The first 3 minutes is excellent, the rest belongs in some other movie.

Jonah Hill and Michael Cera are excellent as the two friends. They play it right on the edge - are they in the closet, or is it just that their loyalty to each other has gotten in the way of their het love lives?

Emma Stone as the heart throb DDG girl also does a great job of keeping us guessing whether she really is attracted to the little fat kid, or if she is just using him. And the girl in the obligatory "cops burst in while teenage couple are boinking" scene is the bestest eye candy in ages - her stage name is Aviva. I would sell myself to the gypsies to be with her.

Otherwise, poorly acted, poorly directed, not particularly well photographed, and a sound track consisting completely of canned songs nobody had to pay much royalties for. Audio editing was good, though.

I'd not spend matinée money on it - but it's worth a rental. I suspect it will be available real soon.

I Shoulda Known

Fry's screwed up the alarm thing - first they didn't have the part for and wanted to charge more than double to install the trunk release. They only had a week and a half to prepare. Then I get the car home and discover the passive alarm function is not user-programmable, has to be done by the installer. You would think they would at least mention this. and they didn't install the valet button. And it doesn't look like they programmed the alarm to talk to the remote - this remote is supposed to show doors open, and alarm conditions, and it doesn't.

So tomorrow I'll go down to AudioWerk and at least get the passive alarm and 2-way functions punched in. With any luck they will have the trunk release part. The valet button is not critical, but I'll ask about that too.

The work they did was worth the $100 I paid, but not the 8 hours lost use of the car. At least the weather was perfect for a walk. Which is good because I walked almost 5 miles.

some of my stuff made it

into SF/SF which you can see by clicking on this here link

They used some of my SiliCon 2007 pix for johnnyeponymous's article on the con, and ran my article and some of the photos of the Italian Zombie Makeover. They opted for larger rather than more zombie makeover photos, which is what I call Intelligent Design good clean layout style. But there's something to be said for seeing the whole process in pictures, so I encourage you to take a look at the best 27 in the flickr set, or for those of you who have nothing to do all day except look at photos of the living dead, my complete web gallery set.

I should add that they did use three of my favorite four photos. I guess their tastes don't run to close-ups of maggots. :-)

In addition to my stuff, there's also a review by cmdrsuzdal and a story about frankwu's special guestdom in Santa Rosa. As usual, you'll find basfa meeting minutes and David Moyce's incredibly complete SF events calendar. I was the events calendar editor for my university paper for a couple of summers, and am here to tell you it's a pain in the butt not easy to crank those out week after week. Just getting everything into the right format can be a full-time job.