Recently in Film Category

All ya'll probably have seen this, but it is so exciting. Rawr!

Volks has posted a sentimental history of super dollfie, contests and games, and a nearly complete sketch of their events for the year! This includes TWO US Dolpas for June and November. View: Super Dollfie 10th Anniversary Events Schedule

Dolpa3 in NYC.
June 7th - 8th 2008
Fashion Institute of Technology NYC, NY

In conjunction with FDQ. Registration will be through the Volks site, when they post it. It looks like Volks is beta-testing a new store interface on the Japanese side. Neat!

Also: greatest thing about the writer's strike? It sent us scurrying for downloadable content on the internet. Yay for BBC programming! Mr. Kallisti has been on a quest to get me mostly Eastenders (I died a little when they cancelled the series on BBC America), every available costume drama and mystery thriller airing. We just transfer it over via wifi on the TiVo and blammo! Plays like TEEVEE.

New favorite show EVAR: Phoo Action

From the genius who brought you Tank Girl and Gorillaz, Jamie Hewlett. Whitey with the red hair back there is wearing Buddha's magic underpants!

(gosh it is hard to get around to posting even when I'm in the moooooood! bizzy, bizzy!)

After having lost the Volks lottery for the A&P outfit last month, I pulled myself up and made the pattern included with Volume 8 of DollyBird for the Alice & the Pirates dress. If I weren't so overwhelmed this month I'd make all three patterns... but I have stuff to do! Lulu looks fantastic, don't she? They didn't include the hat pattern, so I had to figure that one out myself. Oy! I used inkjet decals for dark fabric to get the patterns on the dress. It turned out really well, I think!

I also had the very great fortune to get invited to have dinner with the Isobe's of Baby, the Stars Shine Bright here in San Francisco a few weeks ago. I'll make more hay about that at a later date.

I just want to say though, that VIZ Media/VIZ Pictures, the lovely folks who hosted the dinner, will be building and opening the VIZ J-Pop Center in San Francisco's Japan Town some time in 2008. Including a small theater featuring anime and Japanese live action films. It sounds like it will be all kinds of amazing!

In fact, I had just been thinking how much I was enjoying the second season of HBO's "Rome."

History that hurts | Salon.com

"Rome" is incredibly entertaining, while also being incredibly shocking. It's history porn.

Mmmmm, history porn. Awesome article.

Aieeeeeeeeeeee! Available for preorder now. To be released in four months *falls over* on April 10th. I've been waiting for sooo long. Season One was out in 2001! That is a mighty long time.

We're very excited. Go order yours now. K, thanks.

Because the new year is all about making lists!

Now Playing:

Pan's Labyrinth: Almost went to see it NYE. But smacked self in head thankfully before driving into the City (it ain't playin' in the Boonies of Berkeley yet).

Didja know?!?! Heavy Metal Parking Lot DVD is available from Atomic Books.

They're cool. I wrote them once and asked them what it was like to live in Baltimore. And they answered. Very nice...

As to the video, if you haven't seen it... go. now. A classic. Every boy needs one in his xmas stocking.

This just in: From my favorite critic at Salon.com. Stephanie Zacharek always gets it.

No one-time teenager has suffered more from the cruelty of history's gossip mill than Marie Antoinette. When she was told the peasants were starving for lack of bread, the Marie Antoinette of lore shot back, "Let them eat cake!" -- a great line, straight out of "Mean Girls," except that the real Marie Antoinette never said it. Imported to France from her native Austria at age 14, she was the brokered bride of a future king, a bargaining chip with a womb. Her purpose was to cement peace between, and solidify the power of, the two nations. Marie Antoinette landed in a country, and a court, that eyed her with suspicion and contempt: She was a callow, uneducated foreigner, barely worth the disdain of oh-so-civilized France, and the fact that she couldn't immediately produce an heir didn't help. But because she was a future queen, she had access to -- and availed herself of -- the grand and costly buffet of opulence that had been the norm in Versailles long before she arrived. To paraphrase a lyric from another Lesley Gore song: You would shop, too, if it happened to you.

There is shopping in Sofia Coppola's buoyant, passionately sympathetic dream-bio "Marie Antoinette" (which plays the New York Film Festival Friday night, and opens in New York and other cities on Oct. 20). But this is not -- as you might have believed if you trusted the reviews out of Cannes, scrawled by critics from the garretlike confines of their hotel rooms as they clutched their Mao jackets tighter to protect themselves from the threat of beauty, pleasure and decadence -- a movie about shopping. Nor is it a straightforward biopic or a history of the French Revolution (it never purports to be either of those things).

"Marie Antoinette" is Coppola's silk-embroidered fantasy sampler of the inner life of a queen we can never really know: It's a humanist comedy-drama decked out not in sackcloth but in ribbons -- instead of flattering our ideas of our own virtuousness, it asks our sympathy for this doomed queen even as we can't help envying her privilege.

Read on...

Swoon and die.

I've updated Décolleté with my review of Marie Antoinette, half way down the entry.

I'm now accepting comments on Décolleté, you can also add a news feed subscription via this link. Here's the Livejournal ready feed, add me!

I don't know how I feel about this. Article at New York Times.

I just don't know why they can't do something more rock 'n' roll and keep the costumes more traditional. Or something. I'm not that stuffy, I've loved some non-traditional adaptations. But they have to be good. Like "Titus." Yarm, yarm!

But I really haven't liked much of the recent Tudor pix or series, and one of the reasons is their modernist approach and all that "must get the ignorant masses to relate to crazy tudor england" stuff. I love Jonathon Rhys Meyers though. And Jonathon Rhys Meyers in gold lame even better.

I guess after Anne of the Thousand Days it is all downhill.

Also, why "The Tudors"? Looks like it is just one Tudor to me. Meh.

I'm just sayin'.

We go to The City infrequently. So it is always the awesome to run into someone unexpectedly. This time it was Augie! We were picking up a wee blobpi for Mr. Kallisti's birthday (mwah!) at Super 7. And in walks Augie with flyers/posters for his latest: "Shock It To Me" Halloween Horrorfest at the Castro. I jumped all over him and whisked him off to din-din around the corner at that really good ramen place that we hadn't been to yet. Yay!

We were friends when I was in HS. And roommates briefly when I first moved to The City. Last time I saw him he was putting on Godzilla fest. He's just written a book (editing) and got bitten by a brown recluse earlier this year... eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek! For real.

So yeah, the fest is the same weekend as the Volks party, but we'll try to make the Friday night Hammer fest. Aaaaah!

I also brought up the Cerrito Theater happening a couple blocks away, since it will be run by the folks at the Parkway in Oakland. He says they currently have plans to move Thrillville to El Cerrito! Swoon & die! Totally stumbling distance from our house.