I had another dream last night. In this dream a pregnant Jennifer Connely and I fell in love, but she was married to LL Cool J. (Why was she married to LL Cool J? Because Ladies Love Cool James, that’s why.) Even pregnant she was uber hot. I have no idea why I had this dream.

——To be a T-101 or not to be a T-800, that is the question——

Arnold is indeed called the T-101 in T2. Why did James Cameron change it? It makes more sense as T-800, and sounds cooler to boot. I mean, there has been a whole hell of a lot of models of Terminators made (see T1, where Reese tells Sarah of the Terminators with rubber skin that were easy to tell were Terminators, and compare to the first Terminator units in T3, taking into account that any machine that kills humans (the flying things and the tank things) is given a T-number, and it makes sense that the Arnold Terminator would be 800) and it makes more sense that the 1000 would be closer in number to the 800 because they were not made that far apart, otherwise John would have destroyed the machines before they could have made a T-1000. T-101 is just plain stupid.

Why I think they did it: Two reasons. A) It makes Arnold seem even more out of date compared to the new Terminator he is fighting, raising the stakes for all of those involved. B) This way all the numbers are ones and zeros, so that it looks like binary, and therefore even more machine like.

——Magnolia——

I watched this last night because a friend and I were having a semi-argument over which was better, Magnolia or Punch-Drunk Love, and I realized to have a better grip over the conversation I would have to watch Magnolia again, because I’ve only seen it the once and that was three years ago. So I popped in the disk to my DVD player last night, sat down with some popcorn, and was ready to give this movie another fair shot.

Now I have to give this movie credit. I was a little too hard on it. Excellent acting, directing, editing, script. So what is my problem with it? I just don’t like the movie, is it. It’s not really a movie that asks you to like it either, so that isn’t surprising. The movie is worth being admired, but I just don’t like most of it. The characters, although well drawn out, I just don’t like any of them. The movie is rather depressing, as are the characters. Not only that, but the rain seems only to increase as the movie gets more depressing, to the point where the most depressing part of the movie it starts to rain frogs because there is no more water, which only amplifies how depressing it is.

I also have a problem with the pacing of the movie. Every characters sequence takes a lot of time, with much more dialog than any other Hollywood movie would allow. Which is fine, but all of the multiple stories are told at the same time, so that when you are watching one story which in real time would take like four minutes for us to get through, in the movie that four minutes could last fourty-five because you keep bouncing around to other stories. What this succeeds in doing is to make the movie seem even longer than it really is, and at three hours long it is already really damn long.

Some odd points to the movie–Which is more of a coincidence: that frogs would fall from the sky at this important time in all of the character’s lives, or that they would all be singing Aimee Mann’s Wise Up at the exact same time? Why the hell are they all singing Wise Up? The movie is all serious and depressing, and then all the sudden the old guy dying is singing a Aimee Mann song. What’s up with that? Why do that? Yeah, it makes sense that the coked up girl would be singing it, but does everyone else have to join her?

Also, I’m not really sure I get the ending. I get that they all have to accept the past and move on into the future, accepting whatever consequences that entails, but why do the frogs have to be there? (I mean, they are obviously cool, but do they NEED to be there to tell the story the movie wants to tell?) What happened to the Old Quiz Show guy? Did he shoot himself? It’s hard to tell if the frog made him shoot himself, or if it knocked the gun away from his head and towards the wall. The camera never comes back to check on him, even though it goes to all of the trouble to showing the bullet hit the outlet, supposedly starting a fire. But again, why the frogs? Is it suppose to signify that when all of the stars aling and all of the characters lives fit in sync that a cosmic event should occur? Why does the cops gun come down with the frogs? Some thug stole it. What was he doing with a swamp full of frogs?

So yeah, I have all of those problems with Magnolia, and I just don’t like it, even though I really do admire it for trying.

——The Amazing Race 4——

Of course, once I finally start to like the models they get kicked off the show. Damn models. And they got kicked off by Richen and Chip of all people, the biggest assholes on the show. Oh well, at least I got to see Tian all muddy.