Your Highness

We had a Natalie Portman mini-fest last night, where we each chose a movie from Amazon Unbox (downloaded to the Tivo), and we each happened to choose one of hers.  My selection was first, so Julie begrudgingly agreed to watch Your Highness, with the knowledge that her choice would be automatically downloading immediately after.

Your Highness is a spoof of medieval quest films, with a beloved, overachieving prince (James Franco as Fabious), his damsel in distress (Zooey Deschanel as Belladonna), a petty, unrealized potential, jealous brother (Danny McBride as Thadeous) and a mysterious warrior from another land (Natalie Portman as Isabel).  Overall, it's a crude humor, profanity laden, sight-gag ridden and at times gratuitously bloody movie that made me laugh out loud and revel in the bad-assery that is Natalie Portman.  Isabel is Amidala Unleashed and Padme with a Potty-Mouth.  She has Nina's insane drive from Black Swan, without the self-destructive bent.  The destruction aims squarely at her foes, starting with (spoiler alert) a sadistic captor (somehow they squeezed a Mad Max style arena scene into a knights questing movie) whose giant hydra hand puppet she dismembers one finger/neck at a time, finishing with an evil-soliloquy-ending javelin to the chest.

What's that? How are the rest of the cast/characters? Oh yeah, they're in there too. But let's just be clear - it's all about Ms. Portman, who can deliver outrageously tacky lines with such gravitas that you don't notice how offensive they would be had they been spoken by another actor in another setting, and whose fight scenes out-BAMF even Samuel L. Jackson.

My recommendation: set aside your bad taste filter for a couple of hours (in fact, lock it out of the house for the duration) and just go with it.

Ratings:
Warp Factor Scale: Warp 9 (4 star).
Tee Shot Scale: (I'l update it once Julie's awake, but I'm guessing it's a surprised Fairway/3 star).

Reviews and Custom Scales

I've designed some appropriate ratings scales, so I'll need to write some reviews to go with them. For reviews from a past blog-life, see this index to reviews on my old blog.  They can be quite entertaining.  I'm trying to remember where the fuck I found time to watch all that stuff, let alone write about it, while working full time and going to law school.  Oh yeah, Starbucks and Red Bull.

But enough nostalgia.  For reference, here are the scales: the Warp Factor scale for me, and the Tee Shot scale for Julie (I haven't told her about this yet, but I'm sure she'll love it. Or at least she'll humor me).

Warp Factor Scale:
Space Dock - No interest
Maneuvering Thrusters - 1 star
Impulse Engines - 2 stars
Warp 5 - 3 stars
Warp 9 - 4 stars
Transwarp - 5 stars

Tee Shot Scale:
Rain Day - No interest
Out of Bounds - 1 star
In the Rough - 2 stars
Fairway - 3 stars
On the Green - 4 stars
Hole in One - 5 stars

What's in a Geek Name?

A colleague was wearing an awesome DS9 t-shirt at the office the other day, and my complimenting him on it launched us into a discussion thread that went something like this:

• I mentioned that my niece and her husband were considering the name Julian for their upcoming noob, and my feeling that if this were to be the first name, the middle name should be Bashir.
• He wondered whatever happened to that actor, as he could not recall having seen him in anything beyond DS9.
• I said that he was in that Oscar-nominated movie in the desert, with Matt Damon, but I couldn't remember the name.
• He recalled that it was Syriana.
• I described another movie he'd been in, that I couldn't remember the name of, but it was with Patricia Clarkson.  He didn't know who she was, so I mentioned The Station Agent, that she was in with that guy Peter whose last name I couldn't remember but I held my hand up at about 3.5 feet to indicate his height. I also said he was in that show with Carla Gugina, and of course I couldn't remember the name, but it was awesome.
• I then excitedly recalled that he was in that show on BBC, where portals in time open up randomly and stuff comes through.
• He rolled his eyes at me and proceeded to chastise me for not being able to remember the title Doctor Who.
• I rolled my eyes further and chastised him that they don't use portals to time travel on Doctor Who, they use the TARDIS.  There are rifts in Doctor Who, but not portals.  Although possibly that fireplace to 18th century France could be classified as a portal.
• He then correctly placed the show as Primeval, which he had never seen.
• He left my office, and I was left secure in my geek status, even though I was having serious trouble remembering names.