Prescription Medication: Does Less Cost More?

Hey guys, check out my first article for Suite 101 on the stupid methods of prescribing meds that are very tree people friendly, nope nope nope!!!

Love Undying for the Gorgeous Movie That is Paul Solet's Grace!!!

So there hasn't been a really decent evil baby movie for a while, that was until Grace.  Now what to say about Grace…well first of all, putting my cards out on the table to start with, I find babies creepy in general!!!  There is nothing cute about freaky little monkey hands and feet and squashed heads…in my humble opinion of course.  My idea of a cute baby is the lizard baby in the original series of V (the remake has yet to do this sequence however I doubt it’ll be as cute!!!)  And not the girl with the little forked tongue…the proper lizard baby.  See left.  Isn’t that such a cuteeee?  ;)

Anyhoo, now that you know where I stand with babies and their supposed cuteness I shall tell you about little baby Grace and her absolutely adorable awesome fab mommy, (can you guess I like her!?!) Madeline Matheson played by the gorgeous and seriously underrated Jordan Ladd.  Tired of traditional medicine, Madeline convinces her husband that she wants to go with the companionship of a trusted midwife.  Although reluctant her husband agrees, all he wants is the best for his wife and unborn child. 

His mother on the other hand…holy crabby pattolas, she is a horrific woman!!!  Now I don’t mean that in the manner of she’s a bad person (much), she just has serious mother/son issues.  I think the other reason I instantly wanted to hit her over the head with a spade was that she is one of these red blooded, ‘araagh, meat…blood’ kind of people.  Okay that is maybe a slight exaggeration however her sarky remarks about the Vegan meal that Madeline has cooked for them, (and the rest) seriously had me wanting to do a Norman Bates on her.  Anyway, his mother is mortified that Madeline would even dare take her future grandchild to a midwife and is constantly butting her nose referring her to a Doctor that she is close with that is oh so amazing and prestigious and what not. 

Everything changes though when a tragic accident happens and Madeline is left with her unborn child lifeless inside her.  Determined to carry her dead child to term and deliver naturally, Madeline gives birth.  In a little wicked turn that is done in both a stunning yet harrowing manner, the power of Madeline’s love brings the child back to life.  Overjoyed to have been graced with this miracle Madeline names the little girl Grace. 

Now obviously miracles don’t happen without consequences and soon Madeline realises that little baby Grace is a bit different to other babies.  Understandably overtly protective of Grace, Madeline becomes increasingly isolated from everyone, finding herself resorting to horrific measures to keep her child alive. 

What I love about this film is its simplicity, it’s a wonderfully disturbing movie, and one that really gets under your skin without being at all in your face.  It’s beautifully shot and the acting is top notch!!!  Especially from the three main female cast members.  Jordan Ladd gives her best performance to date and major kudos goes out to Samantha Ferris who plays Madeline’s midwife Patricia.  I am officially in love with that woman!!! <3 She is a wonderful actress.  The same can be said for Gabrielle Rose who plays Madeline’s mother in-law, she is superbly freaky and scarily frightening at some points...you’ll see what I mean.  She is so amazing she made me seriously dislike her.  And that’s being nice about it. 

This movie had a lot going on in the background that wasn't really spoken, only really suggested, I think.  This included that of a previous relationship between Madeline and Patricia.  Definitely got my little mind wandering and filling in a whole back-story.  I also loved Vegan theme that ran throughout, one that had an ever so amusing encounter with *some random shop dude*, selling meat in the store.  Made me giggle so much and it was a nice little addition for you fellow horror geeks out there.

And just throwing this out there...when the director who brings us something this fucking beautifully brilliant and Vegan feminist awesome...is also a seriously hot tattooed guy with a wicked sense of promoting and humour....you really can't help but fall for him and add him to your dungeon list!! *cough* Nia...Jen and Sylvia... *cough* ;)

So yay, love the supreme awesomeness of this movie.  And the special features, compliments of The Barnipede, are pretty damn awesome too.  :)

Oh yes, and last but not least, I’d like to give a big shout out to the distribution people for putting the DVD in boxes with recycling signs carved out.  I’d be lying if I didn't do a big squeeeee, when I opened the case.  Laugh at me all you want but hey, it’s horror and environmentalism…it’s Jen in a box!!!  ;)

Attack of the Killer Mutant Foot...

...okay not really, but that would be a pretty sweet movie, haha.  I mean, you always get movies about possessed hands, never feet.  Or do you and I'm just having a moment of slight retardation!?! 

Now when it comes to possessed hand movies, obviously Evil Dead takes the metaphorical biscuit, in second place though...in fact, almost sitting right next to Ash in a nice little tea shop, eating said metaphorical biscuit, is Anton from Idle Hands, giving Ash the high 5 of awesomeness!!!  Obviously with their remaining hands of course.  Boom boom.  How awesome is Devon Sawa though in that movie?  In fact, everyone is great.  And it doesn't matter how many times I watch it, (and trust me, it's been A LATTE!!) I never get sick of it and I always laugh my head off...hmmmm, interesting that!  ;)

Anyhooooohooo, the whole point of this post was to do a little beerhatching about my god damn foot!!!!!  I went to physio the other day to get it checked out, and I swear, with all his pulling and yanking and what not, I think the guy actually made it worse!!!  I now feel like ALL my toes are broken!!!!!!!!!!!!  And that wasn't even the main pain I went in with in the first place!!!!!  So yes, if anyone would like to go a little James Wan on themselves and saw off their foot before doing a nice little stitch job so I can be FrankenMorleysaurus, that would be super sweeeet!!!  And obviously Rex will need the same.  Ooh we can have little crutches too, mwahahaha.  Now I'm picturing my little dinosnore all Frankenweenied up with crutches, haha.  ;)  Good times. 

To immortality AND beyond!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  :D

Gooooey stuff of the Lost love sort.

Okay so I have just been going through stuff on my laptop that I'd written a while ago when I came across this.  Proof that yes, I am a little bit of an emotional sap at times.  Anyhoo, I'm glad that in Sawyer and Juliet's case it all worked out.  And FYI, I loved the last episode of Lost.  Mwah!!!!!!!!!!!! <3

“If I never meet you, then I never have to lose you.”

The penultimate series of Lost posed a number of questions, not least that of “Is it better to have loved and lost, than never loved at all?” If we never met, how different would our lives be?  Is it worth the pain of losing but retaining the love inside, or is life better lived, unknown, unloved.  Do some pains really go too deep that we’d rather lose all memory and connection?  Or is it possible that love proves so real that your spirits can never truly be apart, no matter how far your actual beings are?

“Just because two people love each other doesn’t mean they’re meant to be together.”

The joys of being born in '79!!!

Okay so I know that I’m always moaning like hell about being a certain age.  The thing is though; I like having been born in ’79.  I just hate the number I am.  If I wasn’t born then I wouldn’t have been the perfect age for the X Files, which would have been sinful!!!  The thought of being born into the illiterate, technology obsessed generation of today just doesn’t bode well with me.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love technology…I just think that it’s moving a little too fast.  I guess I just prefer a lot more of the traditional ways of doing things.  I’m glad to be part of the before AND after, at least that way I can do the good old “back in my days” rant.  And you know what; if I’d been born later then I definitely wouldn’t have been the perfect age to be a Take That obsessed freak show, haha!!!  So yes, all hail the joy of being born in ’79, woo hoo!!!

I HATE KFC!!!

With the opening of KFC *shudder* in Arbroath, here is a message I wrote to the Arbroath Herald about a year ago, obviously it wasn't printed, probably a bit too hostile, haha.  Anyhoo, my thoughts are still the same so figured I'd share it with you.  Besides, Arbroath REALLY DOES need a cinema, it's so annoying having to go to Dundee.  And if you don't drive it's even more of a pain in the arse!!!

"So after my plans to go to the cinema were literally washed out after the severe flooding with the burn, I got to thinking...why is it that we still don't have a cinema in Arbroath???  The one thing that this town really needs yet instead what do we get, KFC!!!  A place that is so vile and crude in its animal cruelty that it literally tortures, burns and scalds roughly 1 BILLION chickens per year!  These poor creatures are squashed into excrement filled sheds where their wings and legs are often broken before having their beaks cut off, throats slit and then, frequently whilst concious, being dipped into scalding hot water to remove their feathers.  How and why is it that we live in a town that considers this barbaric behaviour more important than giving us something to do on a rainy day, or a winter night?  Surely as a town we should be coming together to say look, this is a fishing town, not a vulgar tacky corporate fast food joint!  Surely actually giving people something to do like go to the cinema would reduce the need for people to just go to the pub, because lets face it, that’s pretty much all there is to do!  Well that and get fat with both environmentally and animal un-friendly fast food outlets!!!  The Declaration of Arbroath was prepared as a formal Declaration of Independence for goodness sake!  Can we not at least try and maintain a little bit of culture and well, independence!?!”

 

Jennifer Cooper, Arbroath

My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks = LOVE that never should have ended!!!

Why is it that when a really, really good teen show comes along, the network goes ahead and cancels it!!!!!  It happened with My So-Called Life in the '90's and it happened with Freaks and Geeks in the Noughties.  I say the noughties because the show never actually aired here till 2001.  Watching Freaks and Geeks again for the first time since when it originally aired in the UK, and totally have that 16 year old I want to be back at school feeling all over again.

The show is filled with wonderful characters that you generally care about.  Like Jared Leto's Jordan Catalano before him, James Franco plays Daniel Desario, once again the flawed guy, the stoner who has flunked back a year or two.  He's not brain smart, but he's not stupid either and there is something ridiculously attractive about that.  Then you have the Brian Krakow and Nick Andopolis characters.  The boy who is completely besotted with our heroine.  Unlike Brian though, Nick is also a total stoner and not a brainiac.  In the lead is Linda Cardellini as the smart, newly turned grunger Lindsay Weir, who indeed does share a lot of Angela Chase’s characteristics and she is a wee bit awesome.  

Freaks and Geeks was one episode shy of My So-Called Life's 19 episodes and when you think of all the bland and plastic shows that get picked up for a new season year after year, you find yourself thinking, 'why the hell did this get cancelled!!!!!???!'  These are characters you care about; you want to know what happens to them, a hell of a lot more than 95% of the crap that our channels are polluted with.  And when you look at the sheer talent that has come from both of these shows, it's phenomenal.  Freaks and Geeks is like a who's who of the funny crowd in movies today.  I mean it’s a Judd Apatow show with Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Martin Starr and others for Christ’s sake!!!

And James Franco is in my humble opinion, one of the best all round actors out there today.  He is stupidly talented and moves from one role to another with super ease, he’s a natural and I love him for it!!!!  

Favourite moment is probably Daniel playing Dungeons and Dragons with the geeks, super hot!!!!  I think that’s my Jordan Catalano boiler room episode squeeeage all over again, haha.  <3

Auschwitz for chickens!!!

This is probably one of the most horrific things that you could actually watch.  I hate KFC with a passion and am mortified that my little fishing town has been subjected to the vile repulsiveness of said chain.


Watch more videos at KentuckyFriedCruelty.com.

Piracy: Why it fucks me off!!!!!!!!

Okay so I am presently delagaged to my bedroom as I refuse to sit in a room and watch a pirate copy of Machete.  It seriously fucks me off that A. guys that work offshore get pirate copies of everything and B. that I actually have a boyfriend that is sitting watching said pirate copy!!!!!  Grrrrrrrr.
I don't understand how an individual can consider themselves a movie fan when they can quite happily sit and watch an illegal copy of something that they know they are going to enjoy.  Where is the fucking logic in that!?!!!  Yes, let's download the movies that aren't going to make so much money at the box office and henceforth aren't going to install confidence in the money men to give these awesome directors the money to make more awesome movies.

The thing that most people don't seem to get is that these directors, apart from a slim few, they don't get loads of money thrown at them.  The whole retarded excuse of 'but they have plenty of money' is bullshit!!!!  That is not true and I hate to even think of the remotest of politics that go on in this industry.

 At the end of the day, piracy is piracy.  Further to my point, when I initially wrote this rant (it was about a week ago), I have since been in the company of a number of people to whom I have said I can't wait for Machete.  The response I got was, it's amazing, better than Planet Terror...can't believe you haven't seen it yet!!!  Of course I haven't seen it yet, it hasn't come out.  It's not even out to buy on DVD in the States yet!!!

I just don't get it.  People complain about the lack of decent movies, especially within the horror industry.  Yet they then download these movies.  And then I hear the excuse of, but I've wanted to see it since I saw the trailer a couple of weeks ago.  Do you know how long I have waited to see some movies, just because I refuse to watch pirate copies of them!?!  Spiral had been premiered at Frighfest years before it was released on DVD here and Grace, hell I gave up and bought a Region 1 copy.  The thing is, people don't seem to think that they are doing anything wrong by downloading these movies.  Yet they will pay to go and watch shitty Michael Bay remakes and downright piss.  They're the movies you should be downloading if you have too.  Not the small decent indie ones.

Yes, I admit it is frustrating when movies come out in the States and take forever to appear over here in the UK, but you know what, some movies are worth it.  And these are the movies you should be going to the cinema to see if they are lucky enough to have that priveledge.  And if not, then at least please buy or rent them to show support.  Now I could bring a point of mentioning Adam Green's Frozen, a movie that from my last post you can see I totally love.  The weekend that this movie came out to buy in the States (a week or so prior to its supposed theatrical UK release), I was all excited to see that it was number 7 on the IMDb Hit List.  There was me thinking, woohoo, finally, a genuine horror director was being recognised for a bloody good film.  So I post a message on Adam Green’s Facebook to see if he knew about this, to which he replied that it was in that position due to people downloading it over the weekend and then going on the boards to boast about downloading it.  What the fuck!?!!!!  I think this is a perfect example of a movie that should have got a wide theatrical release but didn’t due to the good old money men thinking it wasn’t going to make that much money so what’s the point!?!!!!  If that many people were downloading it then it showed a hell of a lot of interest in the film, but because it was being illegally downloaded, that interest wasn’t enough to give it the theatrical release that it deserved.  This whole situtation confuscles me.  

A perfect example of how DVD sales helped to save something…Family Guy.  Not enough people were watching so the network cancelled, yet due to superb DVD sales, it has been reinstated.  Twice!!!!!

And the good thing about actually purchasing the DVD means that you get all the special features, which if you look at my Frozen review, can sometimes be just as enthrawling as the movie itself.  So yes, support decent independent movies, especially horror and help join the forces of eternal horror geeks to prove that there is a shit load of bloody good directors in this genre…they just have to be given the chance to show that they are a million miles away from Michael Bay remakes and the like!!!!!   

Major love for Adam Green's FROZEN!!!

I’ve been rather lucky to have had the joy of seeing two absolute gems from Ariescope pictures as of late (the second of which, Grace, I shall post my babblings later on during the week).  And you know when you wait absolutely ages to see a movie, get really excited about it and then it’s shite, or at least shite by your god like expectation of what it should be!?!  Well, I’m happy to announce, these were both far from anything even remotely shite.  In fact, they are two of my favourite horrors that I’ve seen in a while.  The first of these movies is Frozen.  As the 3^rd movie to come from the weird and wonderful mind of director Adam Green who has taken us from the swamp in New Orleans with Hatchet, to Spiral, his dark and twisted Psycho’esque thriller to this time, high up in the snowey ice cold mountains of a ski resort.  The premise of Frozen is incredibly simple, best friends Dan Walker, Joe Lynch, and Dan’s girlfriend Parker are on a snowboarding trip (or skiing for Lynch who doesn’t want to join the trend of snowboarding which made me giggle) and after a day on the slopes, convince the guy running the chairlift up the slope to let them have one last run.  He eventually agrees and the guys are off on their way up the slopes on the cable car.  When a problem arrives and the guy who has let them on their way has to leave another employee to turn off the chairs, with instructions not to turn the chairs off till the last 3 people come down, the replacement guy sees 3 guys reach the bottom of the slope, assumes that is that and switches off the chairs.  At first Dan, Lynch and Parker assume this is just a technical glitch as there had previously been one earlier on in the day, and that the chairs would restart at any moment however soon it becomes apparent that isn’t the case.

From the very start when the black screen appears with FROZEN in bold white letters, you know you’re in for something stark and unnerving.  And stark and unnerving is exactly what you get.  With a lack of blood, guts and gore, Frozen primarily relies on its 3 leads and the gorgeous yet harsh environment that surrounds them to build up the tension.  The 3 leads are absolutely superb with relative newcomer Emma Bell showing she’s just as good as the boys who include Kevin Zegers who I’d been a fan of ever since his appearance in The X Files season 3 episode ‘Revelations’ in 1995.   It’s been great watching him grow as quite the horror boy as well and both Zegers and real life friend Shawn Ashmore are superb in their roles as best friends, as one would expect.  I especially love Ashmore when he’s talking about how Dan and he have been friends since they were stupidly young and that Parker was the new girl in his life in comparisson.  The way that the character Lynch portrayed his feelings towards her was done with real heart, even if it was initital frustration at her being there.  And whilst I’m on the topic of great character writing, there is one moment when Parker is talking about how her dog will think she’s abandoned him when she doesn’t come home, its real heart wrenching stuff and I did have a tear in my eye.  I think that’s one of my worst fears, my dog thinking I’ve abandoned him, it’s horrible. 

The fourth character in the movie is definitely the landscape!!!  As beautiful as it is to view, it is equally treachourous in its beauty.  I am so happy that I managed to see this in the cinema as it’s a film that really should be seen on the big screen. (Film distributors please take note of that comment.  Stop realeasing shite remakes and general crap that give the horror industry a bad name and give movies like Frozen a chance.  I am sick and tired of having to defend an industry that I know has so much promise and in which there is some remarkable talent, to general movie viewers who just totally slate it!!!)  I was most unimpressed when I discovered that upon the date of release I couldn’t find a cinema that was showing it.  After hours of internet trawlage, I discovered that there was one cinema in the whole of Scotland with taste, The Cameo Playhouse in Edinburgh.  Now as cinema venues go, this was a superb place.  If you get the chance I thoroughly recommend it.  It’s a big old beautiful building filled with quirkiness everywhere you look.  And the seats are bloody comfortable!!!

So anyhoo, if the closest you are going to get to see this is on your nice big flat screen TV at home then that’ll have to do.  And you know something, as someone who generally hates Blu-ray and HD, Frozen is actually a movie I’d consider an exception. Frozen, in my humble opinion (oh the wise words of Angela Chase), is the kind of movie that was meant for high definition.  It’s that visually stunning. 

Now I don’t really want to say too much more about the film, I want you to enjoy it for yourself.  I will however point out the wonderful behind the scenes featurettes on the disc.  They had me just as hooked as the movie.  Behind the Mountain: Beating Frozen is easily one of my favourite movie featurettes since the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition features.  Major kudos goes out to Adam Barnick who joined the brave forces on the mountain to bring us four outstanding documentaries that kept me truly engrossed and also left me thankful for the cosiness my hot water bottle brought me as I was watching them.  Over the four featurettes I really gained a whole sense of family that this group of individuals have.  Despite some of the horrific conditions that they were filming in, I kind of wanted to be there and join in the snow shovelling and what not.  That’s testament to a good documentarian.  And a good film maker.

So yes, to sum it up, I love this whole DVD (or Blu-ray) package and would recommend it (and have being doing just that) to everyone, genre fans and all ye other peoples alike.  I am happy to be 100% TEAM GREEN!!!! <3  And big giggles to the cameo from the terrible twosome of director Adam Green and his man love Joe Lynch (director of the super awesome Wrong Turn 2 and partner in crime to Mr Green in a number of the fab Halloween Ariescope shorts)...made me laugh out loud and then have to explain why I was laughing at two random dudes on a ski lift.  :) 

Anyhoo, next keep your peepers peeped for my thoughts on Grace.