I have a new criterion for evaluating someone’s critical taste. I will ask, “Did you see Van Helsing?” If the answer is “Yes,” I will ask their opinion of the movie. If they say anything other than, “Wow, that was irredeemable trash, wasn’t it?” I will have no respect for this person and need never listen to a damn thing they have to say on the subject of movies, stories, or the best way to spend two hours of one’s life.

Good God, what a bad, stupid, insulting movie. Seriously. Terrible script. Terrible. No story. Awful acting—and not in a fun sort of way either. No sense of pacing. Nothing fun to do with the beloved monsters of Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Wolfman. Nothing makes sense—and not in a fun sort of way either.

Ugh. Unbelievable that this made any money at all.

Later: I posted on a mailing list more details about why this movie bugged me so much. Here’s basically what I posted (edited a bit):

(Sorry if there are any spoilers in what follows, but seriously — if
this movie can be spoiled for you, it should be.)

The movie wants to make use of the Big 3 Universal monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Wolf Man. Okay, that lends itself to diluting the overall thrust, so we’ll divvy them up: one will be the good guy, one will be the bad guy, and one will be…hmmm. Something.

Dracula will be the main bad guy. It’ll turn out that he can only be killed by the Wolf Man. That’s kind of an addition to the mythology, but since other things we know about the Wolf Man—how you turn into one, for example—are the same, we’ll allow it. Also, this allows us a reason why Our Hero becomes one of the three monsters. So, while the Wolf Man isn’t good, he’s necessary to kill Dracula. Frankenstein’s Monster will be a good guy. He’s intelligent, he’s scared of Dracula, he wants to help Van Helsing.

So far, it’s okay. Nothing terrible, nothing special.

Then the movie goes off the deep end.

In Van Helsing, Dracula desperately wants to get his hands on Frankenstein’s Monster. Something about how Frankenstein’s Monster was raised is important, which is why Dracula needs to get his claws on him.

And why is that? Turns out Dracula needs the tech used to make the
Monster in order to create his offspring.

I’m sorry…what the fuck?

We all know vampire mythology — we know how Dracula makes his “children.” We know, in fact, that that’s how he does it in this movie too, because one plot point involves Dracula threatening to turn Princess Black Latex into one of his wives. So what’s all this crap with electricity and Frankenstein’s Monster and sacs of bats (seriously)…? Why was that again?

(When we saw the sacs of batlings, Darin said, “I know the queen Alien is around here somewhere.” It was that obvious a rip-off of Aliens. I responded, “What are we supposed to use, harsh language?”)

So the entire point of this movie, ostensibly to use the three stars of the horror movie canon, comes up with a stupid and completely unnecessary addition to vampire lore as the engine of the story.

Oh yes: and everything else about the movie sucked too. But it’s hard to rise above complete stupidity, so that’s not that surprising.

I went to the ATM today, as I haven’t been in a while. The branch of my bank I went to had a snazzy new ATM setup, with Hi Tech Graphics and touch screens and everything but a back massage. Neat. I put my card in, I type in my PIN, I go through the rigamarole.

While the ATM counts out the money and prints my receipt and all, I glance at the picture of the ATM card that they put underneath the card slot and I think, “That’s not the card I put in there.”

The cash door pushes money at me and the receipt prints out and then my card comes out. Indeed, I did not put my bank card in there; I put my regular ol’ Visa in there. I have no idea what my Visa’s card PIN is; I have never used it for cash. The receipt in no way mentions that this was a Visa cash advance, although of course it doesn’t have my bank balance on there either.

What happened?

1. Dude! You got lucky! Free money! Where’s that bank?
2. In fact, you have beaten the 1-in-10000 odds (probably slightly less than that) and, in fact, your bank card and your Visa card have the exact same PIN.
3. The bank could frickin’ care less as to whether you have the PIN for a Visa card. Have Visa card, get money. In which case: where’s that bank?

To: Time

I can only assume with your choice of Ann Coulter as the cover at the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing that you are either woefully stupid or want to up sales by pandering to the right-wing extremists that Ms. Coulter appeals to. Stupid or venal: which is it? In either case, you shouldn’t be running a newsmagazine.

“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”
–Ann Coulter as quoted in the New York Observer, Aug. 20, 2002

“RE: McVeigh quote. Of course I regret it. I should have added, ‘after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters.’”

–Ann Coulter, from an interview with Right Wing News

Rob and I have decided we need to do a race a month in order to keep up our interest in training. We’re not particularly interested in doing a marathon—I want to do a marathon, just not right now. Right now, I want to run regularly and have a good time at it.

So this morning we went to do the HP Up and Running race, which is a good-sized fun run (you don’t get trampled by thousands of people). The downside in a race like this is, when you’re the back of the pack, you’re the back of the pack. There may have been people behind us. I steadfastly refused to look back to confirm or deny. We did the 10K in about 80 minutes, which comes out to about 13 minutes a mile (strangely, the 10K has mile markers; go figure). Not great, but it’s the longest distance either of us has run in a while, and we both felt tired but pretty good at the end. And I felt a hell of a lot better than I did last year, when my foot started hurting something awful around mile 4 and I basically had to hobble in to the finish.

Or we did. Rob and Laura were supposed to come over after the race, but Rob said he was feeling exhausted. Combination of a lot of running and a lot of late-night World of Warcraft, I suspect. I can definitely understand the tiredness: I’m sitting here feeling tired. Not as bad as the first time I ran the Bay to Breakers, when I fell asleep on my mother’s couch immediately upon sitting down. But tired.

The up side of Rob and Laura not coming over was: more cinnamon rolls for us! I made cinnamon rolls, mostly to prove that I could do it. The last time I tried to make cinnamon rolls at home, I didn’t know what I was doing, the dough was too soft and puffy, and the entire process ended up in a stupid doughy heap that I threw away. This time: I know a little bit more, and last night I made a brioche dough that sat in the fridge all night and was nice and cold to work with. I rolled the dough up into its spiral, but then forgot to seal the edges, so all of the rolls opened at the ends. Well, this is how you learn.

I used Nancy Silverton’s brioche recipe from Baking With Julia and the cinnamon sugar recipe from the Sur La Table class I took a couple of weeks ago. Of course, the SLT recipe makes about 8 times too much, so I sealed the remained in Tupperware for the next roll-making occasion. The roll dough was perfect. I need to add more butter (yes! more butter!) to the interior next time to make the roll soft and gushy, but it was pretty damn good as it was.

Yum.

Via Return of the Reluctant, I have found this treasure trove of hilarious comic book covers. Vote for your favorite!

(Rated I, for Immature audiences.)