Anyone who knows anything about my movie tastes and pet peeves knows I simply cannot stand Keanu Reeves. I have always maintained that he is not an actor, he just has a knack for getting roles written for him.

I’ve read other reviews lambasting the special effects, but I thought they went rather well. Their depiction of hell was a nice break from the traditional mountains of tormented souls burning in Hellfire.

In several places during the movie, I had the distinct impression that the director has watched alot of Sam Raimi’s films, most notably Evil Dead – the scene where Constantine is in hell and leaps up to grab the medical wrist tag of Isabela’s and just barely escapes the grabbing hands of the demons seemed almost familiar.

Hmm…would this have been better had it starred Bruce Campbel? I could almost see him doing it :)

Keanu Reeves once again has the amazing luck of landing a role written for him, so he doesn’t completely fail as an actor. It does, however, add another “I am…” line to his repertoire. (I’m Ted (Theodore) Logan…I am an FBI agent!…I’m John Constantine, asshole…etc.) Still, I don’t hate him more after this one, which is the big surprise.

Rachel Weisz is an infinitely better actor, and did very well with the lousy lines she had. I particularly liked her “baptismal” scene, where she’s there under water, waiting for something to happen, and gives that little flick of the wrist that says “Well? What the fuck am I waiting for?”

A small surprise was the casting of Tilda Swinton as the Archangel Gabriel; but looking back I suppose it wasn’t. The only other movie I have seen her in was Orlando, a movie in which she plays a mostly androgenous lesbian who dressed as a man. Here she is again, playing what many think of as a male role, but in an androgenous manner. Fitting, since angels are androgenous. In any case, she pulls it off very well. I particularly liked how she summed up Constantine’s life: “You’re fucked.”

Final thought: worth the rental.

One fine summer day, a young man was visiting a friend’s house and spotted an interesting book on the friend’s shelf. For a paperback, it was frelling huge – over 800 pages. Being the voracious reader the young man was, he figured this would keep him busy for a few days and borrowed the book.

Three days later, he borrowed the second book. Hooked! Equally huge, the books kept him happily reading for almost a solid week. He eagerly awaited the third book in what he assumed was a trilogy.

The third came and went, with the plot still unresolved. “Excellent! A five-book cycle!” he thought. The years rolled by, and at unequal intervals, books kept coming. After book 5, the series almost ground to a complete halt. New characters were added that did nothing for the story except strain the reader’s memory trying to keep them all straight. Each new book would drag on endlessly until the last 50 pages, which would suddenly rock into action – “could he finally be ending it?”

But no, the book would cliffhanger every time. Book 6. Book 7. Book 8. Book 9. All in excess of 600 pages, and the author can’t get anywhere with the plot. The young man’s shelves groaned from the weight of the hardcover editions. Book 10. Surely, this is the last one! He can’t drag it out any more!…

Yes, he can.

Then the bastard goes and spends over a year writing a ‘prequel’ book instead of the next installment. Plans are hatched to hunt the author down and go ‘Misery’ on his ass.

15 fine summers later, I got an email today from Amazon: “Pre-order the 11th book in Robert Jordan’s ‘Wheel of Time’ series – “Knife of Dreams” On sale today!”

From Publishers Weekly

…While more recent entries have maintained that beauty and scope, the pace has slowed to a crawl as the central characters dispersed in six directions. In contrast, the latest explodes with motion, as multiple plot lines either conclude or advance, and the march to Tarmon Gai’don—the climactic last battle between the Dragon Reborn and the Dark One—begins in earnest…

And thus we are faced with the question: Go we once more into the breach? Do we read it now, or wait until he finishes the blasted thing so we can get it all over in one marathon session?

One thing is certain: I’m going to beat Pax the next time I see him for loaning me those first two books.

I’m a bit worked up over something tonight. First, realize that I dedicatedly watch two hours of tv a week: CSI and NCIS. For movies, I watch caper flicks, for tv I go the other way.

So there I am, watching the previews for tonight’s show over the last week, hoping they wouldn’t actually kill a main character. I recorded the show so I could watch it without interruptions (my daughter is here on both nights I watch tv).

Last week, they came damn close to killing off DiNozzo, the teenager-mentality senior Agent. He came back this week a tv-land week early from sick leave. In his first hour back on duty, he falls down a hill (ok, it was a small one), saves Kate from being bitten by a snake (ok, so it wasn’t poisonous) and nearly gets blown up (that one was kinda close).

Later on, Gibbs nearly gets blown up by our good friend Ari, the so-called Massaad double-agent Gibbs shot in the shoulder a few weeks back.

In the last minute of the show, after the big save-the-day scene, Kate jumps in front of a round intended for Gibbs. We all gasp! and wonder if she’ll make it – but of course, she was a smart girl and wore her Kevlar. Whew!

Which is why, in the last ten seconds of the show, that bastard Ari shoots her in the forehead with a sniper rifle from too far away for Gibbs to return fire.

The fuckers.

I know, I know – it’s just a tv show. But still.

For those of you with access to a cable feed, Spike TV is having a CSI marathon this week, so all of us here at chez Wolfie are in hog heaven. I threw a Labor Day barbecue yesterday, and we all sat around watching tv and snarking where appropriate.

Greyduck, however, has once again proved that his Geek-Fu is strong, since we are also recording as many episodes as we can on one of the upstairs workstations. We’ll be able to burn them onto a VCD for watching in the DVD players for those days when there’s nothing on.

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough episodes to cover all of them. TV sucks.

I have been doing some more writing lately, one of the reasons I haven’t been blathering on about other things.

I expanded the original story some, and have a cast of characters and their history for the most part pegged. There are also several pages of dialog written to explain that history, but it’s waaaaay to boring to feed you all at once – I need to throw some plot-building scenes in between segments.

You might even get an update soon, if yer lucky.

I was watching Between the Lions with my daughter this morning when they devoted part of the show to the dangers of opening unknown email, virus infections, and how to use antivirus software to cure them. I was very impressed, since my daughter does have access to the computer (even though she is always supervised when online.)

Score one for PBS Kids!