• This is a shitty remake of a shitty remake of a good story. I don’t think the makers of 2010′s Clash of the Titans even bothered to read the original Greek myth. They just skimmed the script for the 1981 flick and added more strangeness, diluted character motivation, and took unoriginal cheap shots at religion.
• The CG was less impressive than the old-school claymation.
• Pete Postlethwaite was the only dude in the flick who brought it. Everybody else was phoning in their performances, which is understandable as the movie was entirely made up of bit parts.
• I don’t understand why people cast Sam Worthington for parts that aren’t “Henchman #2.” He must have slept with the entire Church of Scientology to be able to keep landing parts in big movies despite having no acting talent whatsoever.
• That metal owl did not need to be seen on screen again, ever.
• I didn’t care about anybody. Nope, nobody. I can’t remember any of the characters’ names except for the ones I know from studying mythology. The two dudes thown in for comic relief provided neither comedy nor relief. I wasn’t sad when anybody died and I wasn’t happy when Andromeda got saved. This was a bland, dull, dazzlingly multinational cast that proved that no matter where you come from and whatever your ethnic background, anybody can be crap at acting. Now isn’t that sweet?

In short, this was not a movie I wanted to see and I hate that I was right when I did see it. There are a few ways this movie could have been something I did want to see:

• Go back to the original story. Don’t remake the ’81 flick — call it Perseus and tell his story. Also, cast somebody as Perseus who doesn’t think that acting means “saying the words written on the script without stuttering.”
• And if you really go back to the original story, you’ll note that Andromeda is the princess of ETHIOPIA. This means she should have been black. Literally every cinematic and artistic interpretation of this story has portrayed Cephus, Cassiopeia, and Andromeda as Greek and super white, and all visual representations of Andromeda seem to be manifesting some kind of bizarre fantasy about raping white girls:
  

  white chick.	white chick.	white chick.	white chick.

  So much for Hollywood being post-racial and post-gender. It would have been cool to see this set in ancient Abyssinia, with like, you know, black people. Get some Egyptian-looking duds on the multi-ethnic cast and then you’ll have a truly international epic, not just a pantheon of generic European accents.

• They should have used a scriptwriter who understands that the audience needs a reason to care about the characters, not a rookie and the idiots who unleashed Aeon Flux on us like a case of bad diarrhea. Clash of the Titans put some people on the screen and said, “This is Protagonist Man. You should care about him because he almost died as a baby, and babies are cute so you should care.” It doesn’t work that way. Even good actors like Liam Neeson can’t polish a turd, and this script was a stinky lump of number two.

I doubt the movie I’m imagining will happen because they’re letting these idiots make a second one. Sigh. I keep waiting for the day when Hollywood at large will learn, as those northern rebels at Pixar did, that commercial viability and artistic value are not mutually exclusive concepts. Until then, I’ll be over here translating this post into Latin, as it’s a lot more entertaining than most of what hits theaters . . .

I love my new cat Loki. I’ve only had him for three weeks and I already can’t remember what it was like not to have him. He’s a massive dork. He rolls over and falls off the bed. (Like me.) He chases after toys, leaps flailing into the air, and falls to the floor in the most ungracious manner conceivable. (Like me.) He gobbles down his grub and then passes out on the couch, unable to move for hours. (Like me.) He’s even in the Cool People With Green Eyes club. (You’re noticing a theme here.) So far the only thing he does to annoy me is his tendency to lay on my laptop to prevent me from paying more attention to it than I do to him.

I expected that I would make kissy-wissy faces at the kitteh, and that I would worry about his well-being far beyond the needs of an animal that can basically look after himself in luxury surroundings where he is lord and master of his domain. I also expected that he would be expensive, and so far I’ve dropped a good thousand bucks on toys, food, bedding, a water fountain, an automatic poop-scooping litterbox, and wand toys with feathery pom-poms on them. Something I didn’t expect when buying a cat was that it’s impossible to get reliable online reviews for any cat products online.

Typically product reviews online, like if you want to buy a drill or a pair of shoes, you see the following:

1. How well the product functions
2. How easy the product is to use
3. If the product is worth buying

Reviews about products and services written by cat owners include one or more of the following:

1. A glowing thumbs-up endorsement written from the perspective of the cat
2. An explanation that while the product is designed well and in theory should function perfectly, the cat’s psychotic behavior renders it useless
3. Psychotic ranting about how this horrible, terrible, evil, awful product or service isn’t good enough for the cat owner’s little poopykins
4. A detailed explanation of the cat’s defecation process
5. Nasty personal attacks on the designers or purveyors of the product or service

I might be crazy about my cat, but I solemnly swear not to become a crazy cat lady.