Post by the667er on Feb 3, 2008 15:27:17 GMT -5
February 3rd – February 10th.
Editor-in-Chief: Akbar Le Grey.
Contributors: PJ, umbrellaella, Dismay, Linda, Cupid, tim, THE MYSTERIOUS REPORTER.
Published by 667er Publications, ltd.
A subsidiary of the 667er Group.
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Nothing Happens – A Reporter Reports[/size]
667ers were horror struck this week to find that nothing had happened. Upon hearing about this, I set out to find out more about this non-incident.
Members were first alerted to nothing happening due to the appearance of Linda’s thread, ’Guys, 667 is boring.’
So 667 ‘is boring’. But what has that got to do with ‘nothing happening’? Unfortunately, everything, as it turns out. As some of you may already know, Science has proven that the number one cause of boredom is, in fact, nothing happening!
Tragedy, the admin of 667 Dark Avenue, has declined to make a statement about the current situation. A scientist studying the effects of nothing happening (and its symptom, boredom) has advised that people should under no circumstances stay in the safety of their homes, as it may, in fact, make the situation that much worse.
In a statement, the scientist – who wishes to remain anonymous – did declare the following:
“When people see that nothing is happening, their first instinct is to stay out of the way; to hide in the safety of their homes. This is exactly the wrong thing to do! Similar cases have shown that inaction in such situations can, in fact, cause nothing to continue happening for an increased amount of time.”
So, my dear readers, don’t stay at home! Come outside! Studies have shown that boredom is only lethal in 0.01 % of all cases, and usually clears up after a few hours, so the danger of the situation is relatively slight – at the moment, that is.
When asked what he thought about it all, a member known only as BSam (23) said: “i dont know. i wasnt there”.
There you have it, my dear readers. He just wasn’t there.
That’s all I’ve got for you this week, folks! I’ll brief you on any developments to the situation in next week’s edition of the 667er!
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Tim here to tell to you about my most happiest animal which you may say hey mister that is a mermaid but a mermais is a magical creature not animal and don’t you forget it so no it is a kitten. I visited a farm last weekend and wowie in the barn I saw a most happy site five fresh kittens and there big fat mommy cat who they were eating of from. The farmer in his big straw hat he said I could hold one and so I picked up a little gray one that was fluffy as can be and I put my soft face into his fur and it was like a mashmallow oh boy but you don’t put a kitten in a hot chocolate let me tell you or there will be some serious reckonings to be reckoning with. So the farmer man ask if I would like to keep the little kitten when he is big enough and I got so much excitement because me and him would be friends in deed. But then mom comes into the barn and says tim what the devil are you doing are you know your father is allergic to cats and if you get any fur on your shirt you are big trouble mister he will be sneeze all the way back to home let me tell you and i will not here the end of it. So I put the kitten back but he is so cut and maybe I can pet him again someday because he is my most happiest animal in the whole wide world and don’t you forget it! if you have a cats or kitten then you are so lucky because theyre are friends that will always land on there feet but do not throw it!
-TIM
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Okay guys, it's official. I'm a rebel. Last night me, my roommate, and two other girls snuck into the boys tower late at night and wrote all over the place in dry erase marker. Only surfaces that we had tested to make sure the marker would rub off, of course (i.e. pretty much everything but the painted walls and doors). And then this morning all the guys were talking about it and it was all we could do to not blurt out that we had done it; we had to leave the room to giggle uncontrollably after a while. It was great.
But now my rulekeeping "Hermione" side of me is starting to wonder why on earth we did it. Which is strange - it's not actually against the rules to do what we did. It IS against the rules to do it at the time we did - girls aren't allowed to stay unattended in the boys tower after 10 pm - but it's a rule they're pretty lax on and we probably wouldn't have gotten in trouble for being there even if we had gotten caught. I don't know, I guess it's just because it was sort of a juvenile, irresponsible thing to do.
It was a fun thing to do, though. If anyone else wants to do something like it and take pictures, that would be the most amazing thing in the world.
-Linda the rebel.
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Hey guys, this is Cupid. In only 11 short days a little day that I very much like, Valentine's Day, will be here, and as a special treat to you guys I'm offering my services as deliveryperson for anyone that wants to send a note, message, valentine, or anything else to that special someone. Just send it as a PM to username cupid. I love you all very much, and I hope you love each other. Have a great Valentine's season!
-Cupid
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Movie of the Week: Night Watch
Trailer / IMDb / Rotten Tomatos: 58 %
You’re all probably wondering what the hell Night Watch is. Night Watch is a (apparently) cult movie that I finally managed to watch last week after having borrowed the DVD from my good friend Kig for about 7 months. Also, it’s apparently one of the highest budget movies to ever come out of Russia. So. Fancy that, eh? And, well, it’s based on a book (the horra!).
So before I start talking about crazy review necessities like plot or cinematography, I’d like to say the following: Anything that is dubbed, almost without exception, will come across as horrible. It just cheapens the acting and adds an abnormality of sorts, which leaves the watcher somewhat uneased. For almost every single foreign movie I’ve watched, I’ve always infinitely preferred subtitles, but there are some people, I guess, who have the reading abilities of a illiterate howler monkey, for whom subtitles aren’t an option. There’s always one. “Turn them off, they’re so annoying”. I have trouble understanding what people sometimes say in movies most of the time anyways, so if it were up to me, I’d have them on all the time. But I digress.
Night Watch is a ‘fantasy epic’ about two groups of supernatural creatures called ‘the Others’. They are, typically, divided into the Good and the Bad, or, in this case, the Light and the Dark. So at the start, while a bunch of burly Russian guys with swords start hacking around in order to symbolize the war between these two groups, with some pretty salsaty exposition, we learn that there is now a truce between the two sides, as they are so equally matched that victory is impossible for either. So the Night and the Day Watch are formed; the Night Watch watches the Dark, and the Day Watch watches the Light.
So here is where the movies’ flaws begin to show. I think that’s how it is. Operative word being ‘think’. The movie never actually comes out and says such, so for the first few minutes me and the guys were wondering if the Night Watch was comprised of Good Guys or Bad Guys. It easily could have been either, but as the movie progressed things became somewhat clearer.
The number one problem with Night Watch is that it didn’t bother explaining things. We had to guess about what was happening and imagine that there was some elaborate reason behind it. This is typically a problem of movies made from books, but in this film it was rather extreme; a little explanation here and there really would have helped. By the end of it, I guess, most of it made a sort of sense, but it was still quite clear that quite a large chunk of information hadn’t been given to us, and everything fitted together in strange and inexplicable ways. I guess the salsatyness of the dubbing also contributed to this a bit, but not too much, I guess.
So back to the plot. It starts out with this nerdy looking guy called Anton, who lives in Moscow, and is at this old woman’s house. His girlfriend is pregnant, but has left him for another man. The old woman, in an unexpected twist, turns out to be some sort of demonic seer, and confirms that the child is the other man’s, and that it will only drive Anton’s girlfriend closer to the other man. So Anton makes the decision to have the child aborted – with black magic.
The old woman prepares some bizarre cocktail involving vodka and blood, which Anton drinks, and then in a surprisingly original sequence, begins to try and kill the unborn baby of Anton’s ex from her apartment. Bam! The Night Watch arrives, one of them turns into a tiger, and the old woman is halted from completing the unholy abortion. Anton finds that he can see them; the Night Watch realize that Anton – who up to this point was just some poor nub who was looking for a little magical assistance (how he contacted the old woman is anyone’s guess) – is actually an Other.
13 years later, Anton is now part of the Night Watch and is, according to this wikipedia article, an alcoholic. This surprises me, because I had thought Anton’s bizarre manner had some otherwordly, occult reason. But no, turns out when he was stumbling around he was just blind-drunk, or something.
Anton gets called in to take out this evil vampire who is about to feed on this coincidentally-exactly-thirteen-years-old-boy and in a surprising twist gets his ass handed to him completely, but when backup arrives, Anton manages to kill the vampire and save the kid.
Ok, I won’t go into exact details here. But things are coming to a head for the occult underbelly of Moscow. Some crazy cursed girl is on the loose, and until someone finds out who cursed her (which will, apparently, get rid of the curse?) bad stuff will happen all around her, culminating in the end of the world. I think. Meanwhile, the afore mentioned 13 year old boy is the one that Anton nearly had aborted, and is also apparently the super powered prophesized Other who, depending on whether he is of the Light or Dark denomination, will help his side defeat the other. Turns out in the end that he actually is Anton’s son. And I have no qualms about telling you this because you almost certainly won’t ever watch this movie. So the Night Watch goes around trying to stop vampires from killing the little boy, and in the end, through trickery and deception, the boy finds out that Anton wanted to abort him, and so joins the Dark.
Ok, that plot explanation was far more detailed than it normally would be, but it is so for a reason. It’ll help me relate this movies biggest flaw and its greatest asset a lot more easily. So we’ll start off with the flaw.
As I’ve said, the movie doesn’t really tell us much. When Anton first goes out to take out the vampire that is threatening his son, he must ingest a lot of blood. This is explained, somewhat, by the throw-away line “don’t you know that the Night Watch only drink blood when they are out hunting vampires?” This, really, doesn’t hand you much, but at least explains whyAnton has a big ole’ jar of blood in his fridge. How exactly it helps Anton hunt vampires isn’t touched upon at all. In fact, it seemed to make him stumble around and act like a drunk – but according to wikipedia, that was probably because of all the vodka Anton had drunk off-screen instead.
Or the cursed woman. One character reads an ancient and ambiguous text about her, which doesn’t really tell you much at all. I was under the impression that this cursed women was still the original cursed woman, from 3000 years ago. That would have been awesome. But no, turns out it’s just an incarnation of her, or something, and it’s just some random Russian girl. Her curse manifested in several ways; crows nesting on her apartment by the thousands, her neighbors puppy dies; her friends’ mother dies. Also, inexplicably, a plane loses an engine and is about to crash (somehow, it manages to stay up for the subsequent 4 or so hours in the movie while the Night Watch sort things out) and a power generator gets wiped out and Moscow is left with no power. I thought this was all some master plan, some sneaky salsa that the Lord of Evil had cooked up, but it turned out that this was just another side-effect of the girl’s curse. Because when it was revealed, dramatically, that she had cursed herself, the power switched back on, the crows all flew off, and the plane miraculously landed itself without causing any damage to anyone anywhere whatsoever.
But enough about that. I’ll move on to this movie’s greatest asset; its originality. Maybe it’s just because I haven’t seen any movies from Russia, or, more likely, it’s just that the plot is very original, but hey, it was actually pretty cool. This movie pulled some new salsa that quite surprised me. The start scene was pretty awesome; the old witch woman’s fingers are writhing and the blood of Anton’s unborn baby starts appearing on them. Anton is screaming, suddenly, the door burst open and the Night Watch arrives. They yell incoherently, one of them turns into a tiger and pounces on the old woman, while another slows down time or something, and as the woman is about to clap her hands together, thereby completing the spell and killing the child – they bring hot frying pan between her hands which she claps instead, burning them.
The scene ends and the woman is sitting, disgruntled at the table while the night watch is interrogating her. The scene is so reminiscent of the aftermath of a normal domestic disturbance that I almost smiled at the way the movie jumped from crazy psychedelic fantasy to (admittedly fantasy) police arresting a common criminal.
Anton is in the train, stumbling around, trying to follow the young boy in order to save him from a vampire, when he sees the cursed woman. Everything goes dark and starts shaking and Anton starts screaming and stuff. Then the movie cuts back to normality and shows Anton pointing at this startled woman, screaming as though his surgeon forgot to use the anesthetic. It was pretty classic, actually. He has a vision and goes batsalsa loco, while everything around him stays the same. Funny stuff.
The duel with the vampire was highly original, too. Anton possesses a crazy torch with some strange light bulb that enables him to see the vampire – which is otherwise invisible. So he’s frightened as all hell, swinging the flashlight back and forth, trying to see the vampire, while the vampire is jumping around being all crazy and edgy. They trade blows, and it all looks pretty standard, when suddenly Anton’s flashlight fails, leaving him in the darkness in an abandoned warehouse with an invisible vampire. Apparently, you can also see vampires in mirrors, so Anton breaks one and starts using a large shard to nervously reflect all around in order to find this vampire. What’s more, the vampire starts beating the ever-living crap out of him. Heck, he even gets a pair of scissors stabbed right through his hand. This is the first proper action scene, and its supposed to show Anton on a routine job, using his edgy Night Watch skills to apprehend a criminal. In any other movie, he’d have gone to town on the vampire, costing the movie millions in special effects by using zany matrix style moves to dispatch his foe.
But not in Night Watch. Anton’s power is having visions of the future, or something, which does jack all when he’s trying to fight. So Anton gets kicked to bits, cut with a pair of old rusty scissors and generally is in a poor shape when backup arrives and he uses his mirror shard to reflect some vampire-pwning light right into the vampire, which pwns him. So then he gets hurried off to some Healer dude who almost kills himself in the process of healing Anton. Pretty good stuff.
Ok, this review is hitting the 4th page of Microsoft word, so it’s about time to finish it off. The movie, while pretty incomprehensible, was startlingly original, and had some pretty neat special effects. The one scene where the Lord of Darkness gets into an elevator and uses his magic to hurl it upwards right through the roof – in order to take out this crazy vampire magee – was pretty classic. So all in all, not a bad movie, but there are plenty of better movies out there to watch. So I rate it an OK (watch this movie if you have nothing better to do).
So that’s about it for this week, folks. In other news, I saw King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters the other day (a documentary about the hi-score of the original Donkey Kong game). It was highly enjoyable, but a bit mellow for my tastes. Still, it scored an unbelievable 100 % on Rotten Tomatos, so you might want to look into it. Next week I’ll do either Wristcutters or Sweeney Todd or maybe even There Will be Blood if it’s out yet. Until then, goodbye.
-PJ
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Owl’s Journey Through PAFQ (2)! Part 2
February 2, 2008
Dear 667ers,
Oh dear, the Aqualians and tree-men are quite the characters, aren’t they? One just says “Yessim” all the time, while the other speaks in a clipped tongue. Hopefully that Aqualian won’t get the owl angry by petting him…. And I hope that stranger is a kind one. And I hope the water and fire didn’t ruin this thing.
Oh, I must catch you up. This week’s journey has been a difficult one. The Saturday I last wrote, we had just completed the first leg- we were sent out on our mission to save Aimilyn Firegold’s younger sister, Chalot, from a mysterious illness.
Oh, yes, you have not met Aimilyn Firegold, Elspeth Silvercerulean, and Azula Twilightsilver, have you?
Aimilyn is between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. She has a younger sister, and her grandfather is a Senator for the Firegold family.
Elspeth is close to Aimilyn’s age, and is an only child. He is a dragon guardian, while his mother is the guardian of those in our small village.
And then there’s Azula, advisor to the village. She is a one and a half foot dragon in the blue spectrum. Her brother, Oryn, is gold. He is Elspeth’s mother’s advisor.
Azula (with my body in the background):
Unfortunately, we had to escape Elspeth’s mother’s cave on a kite, and then were attacked by a man with firestones, setting our kite and Aimilyn’s clothing on fire.
Our Kite:
Poor Aimilyn! She woke to realize that she was not wearing a shirt! That was my funniest major edit. She now is wearing an undershirt, thank goodness!
She also realized Elspeth has a crush on her. Hmmm… this could be interesting.
And now to the tree-men. They rescued us from the water, along with an Aqualian (fish-man).
In addition, we also went through the realm of editing. I edited the first three scenes, which is where we are now, waiting for the fourth to be posted. Hopefully we’ll be prepared, and I won’t go over the word limit (1000 words).
So here we are, Azula on my lap, Elspeth sitting next to Aimilyn, and a mysterious stranger approaching. At least this time we weren’t hanging off of a cliff.
Until next time,
Dismay/Owl
PS: I found out that Mangy posted the next picture. Seems like someone lost his timepiece in the lake.
D/O
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My article is about who people should vote for for the President of the United States of America.
Voting for the President is a very important thing. We don't want to have another stinky head like we have now, do we? I am going to tell you who would be stink heads. First I will tell you the Republicans that are bad. Mike Huckabee thinks people aids should be quarantined. That is not fair at all. My great aunt is blind, so she has an aid and I don't want her to be quarantined. That is a silly reason to do that anyway. He also thinks that God made Adam and Eve and we all come from them. That is silly because we came from gorillas! So don't vote for Hucklebee. John McCain is really old. He will become silly like all old people and make bad decisions. He might even die before his term ends!
Now I will talk about Ron Paul. He looks creepy and old. He is also a Texan, like the current President, so he would be bad obviously! Now time for Alan Keyes. WHO THE HELL IS ALAN KEYES?! is what you are probably thinking. That is exactly why he can not be President, nobody knows who is! He is hiding in the dark corner of this race. If he is hiding now, I'm sure he will hide if he is President and the White House is a big place, so it will be hard to find him when he is hiding. Mitt Romney is also bad. If you rearrange the letters in his name and twist one of the "t"s into and "o", it spells Mormon Yeti. There is nothing wrong with him being Mormon, but he is a yeti! Next week will be about the Democrats.
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Hey guys. This is Linda and I just wanted to thank all you writers that sent in articles this week, especially the new people like umbrellaella and ZOMGMYSTERIOUSREPORTER! And wish Akbar luck in his super-important debating competition.
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