Gawdammit. This past day's sucked ass!
First of all, a major disappointment: this is my second time typing all of this up. From now on I'll be typing my journals into Notepad and then copy/pasting them onto the website as to avoid LOSING MY WHOLE POST again. I hit "add", and the freakin' site goes to the
OMG SUBSCRIBE NOW!@#!!!@!111 page. I click on ANY of the links on the site, and I get the SAME page.
Anyway, I've had quite a few disappointments in the last 24 hours. The first one was last night. I went and saw The Grudge with April and JP. Yeah, the movie was one, great big disappointment.
Don't get me wrong - I had definitely been looking forward to this movie, viewed the entire film with an open mind, and gave it a serious chance. Still, I found The Grudge to be a complete failure of a movie. Now, it had potential. It had SO MUCH potential that I was SURE that the movie was going to be great. However, the movie failed to tap into that potential even once. Allow me to explain.
The most important aspect of a horror movie is to get the audience attatched to the characters. The Grudge had some amazing potential when it comes to this. After all, the cast was made up of (A) a family trying to take care of one family member's eldery mother, (B) the staff of a care center concerned with providing and caring for those who can't take care of themselves, (C) one of the care center's staff's loving boyfriend, and (D) a lonely detective whose friendships were all cut off due to unfortunate circumstances. With a cast like that, it would have taken MINIMAL effort to set up some connection between the audience and the characters, MINIMAL time to develop the characters and the emotional bonds between them and the audience, and then every scare of the movie would have been that much scarier, because the viewers would actually be concerned for the characters, and would actually care about what happened to them. However, the script of The Grudge COMPLETELY overlooked this vital process of character development, as not a single minute of the film was spared for it and the movie simply jumped right into to the scares, which in fact made the movie minimally scary. Characters in a horror movie will never carry more potential than those of The Grudge. The movie, however, never once thought to prove that point.
Second, there's the movie's plot. The plot is about a haunted house that not only haunts you when you enter it, but places a curse on you, causing you to be haunted by the spirits of the abode for the remainder of your life, even after you leave the house. In a nutshell, once a character enters the house, their whole WORLD becomes haunted. There is never again a safe time in their life, there is never again a safe place in their life. Things can happen to them anytime, anywhere. If executed properly, this could have caused the audience to be in constant fear and never-ending suspense for the entire length of the film, as they would be sitting on the edges of their seats, anxiously anticipating the next big fright no matter what was currently happening on the screen. This plot provided the film-makers with literally INFINITE possibilities for completely original scare tactics, giving them the opportunity to do WHATEVER they wanted, WHEREVER they wanted, WHENEVER they wanted in this film. A plot never has, and never will, be able to beat the amount of potential that The Grudge's plot had, and therefore it saddens me greatly to say that the makers of this film jumped straight onto the bandwagon with nothing but cheap, predictable, cliche scenarios.
In the end, The Grudge is nothing but a gigantic disappointment, only made even more so by the fact that given the proper execution - had the film makers actually taken advantage of their incredibly ingenious characters and plot - this movie could have been the pinnacle of the entire horror genre. The minds behind this film are a disgrace to the industry. If they couldn't handle living up to such a promising film, then they should have placed the responsibility in more capable hands. Now my hopes for the perfect horror movie have been shattered, and I fear that there will never again be a film as promising as this one was. I can only hope that time proves me wrong.
I tried my first taste of sushi today. Yet another disappointment, the girl who ordered the food forgot to order my sushi. When my boss - the person who this party was thrown for - found out that I didn't get to try the sushi that I was looking forward to, she insisted that I take some of hers. After that, it turned out that the same girl ordered the wrong kind of pizza - meatlovers' instead of pepperoni, as if Pizza Hut isn't nasty enough already. So what it all boiled down to was that I put in my share - my ten bucks - and ended up bumming sushi off of my boss, eating one piece of disgusting pizza, and then heading to McDonald's with my "free medium fries" Monopoly piece, only to be reminded that the sizes of their fries have all been reduced to nothing. I'm still starving, and I'm out ten bucks.
On a lighter note, the sushi wasn't that bad. It was a little disappointing in a way: just about everyone is divided on the subject of sushi, either hating it with a passion, or dreaming about it day and night, and I was looking forward to finding out what my position would be in this matter. However, I discovered that I'm in a somewhat neutral stance.
The first thing that I noticed about sushi, after learning how to use chop sticks, is that it is incredibly sticky and chewy beyond belief. I had a California Roll (crab meat and avacado?), which was the better of the two pieces that I had. I'd never had any form of crab before, but I was surprised by it. It tasted just like fish, only with a much more powerful taste, which I can only assume is because of the skipping of the cooking process. Raw food = powerful raw flavor? Idunno. It was good. However I was surprised to discover that even though fish is one of my favorite foods, I prefer it cooked, as the flavor of it raw, though the same flavor, was just a little bit too overwhelming for my tastes. After the California Roll I had some other roll that had some brown spicy stuff in it. It was good at first, until the spicy burning sensation kicked in. It wasn't too spicy, but I have a very low tolerance for spicy foods, so it was a bit more than I had bargained for, though I'm sure that the majority of other people would have been able to handle it. Man, did that stuff have an aftertaste. My mouth was on fire even after I ate my piece of pizza, and after I finished my Sobe. Oh! There was also this stuff that I had on the side that was really, REALLY bizzare. I mean, it has to be the weirdest food that I've ever had. It was pink, and thinly sliced, and it looked like meat, felt like meat, and was floppy like thinly sliced meat tends to be. However, upon tasting it, it was unbelievably crunchy, beyond the point of most vegetables, and pretty spicy. Hell if I know what that was, but it was... oh, it was just weird! Overall, though the circumstances were unfortunate, my first time tasting sushi was a very good and interesting one.
So yeah, I didn't find sushi to be bad by any means, but it's not something that I can imagine myself ever craving.
Time for cake!
