Movie Mondays!

I really enjoyed this movie! It’s a character study with a great cast and a story that is alternately serious and comedic. ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! I think it might make it into the category of “chick flick” since the focus is on the dynamic of the relationship between two sisters but, I still found it highly enjoyable. If a talky movie isn’t your thing you’ll be best off staying away but, if you enjoy good performances and quiet drama you will walk away feeling very satiated.

I’m repurposing content by taking my NetFlix reviews and posting them here on the blog. If I could figure out a way to do it, I’d post some kind of link for people to connect and make me their friend on the service. Unfortunately, it isn’t altogether clear how one would do that - so if you know a way, pass it along. In the meantime, I’ve got steady content for at least a year.

Talk to the hand.

Just some fooling around:

The computer has a built in camera. This is something I was aware of but hadn’t really used until last night when I found that you can take all kinds of special effect pics with it among other things. So I indulged myself, took a thermal shot of my hand and silhouetted it.

I forget!

Sometimes, I just forget about the things I can do on the computer. I wind up only using the damn thing to surf the web and fail to do anything productive but, every once in a while I get the bug to fool around again. Just to play the way I did when the computer was still a new thing to me and I rediscover the fun things I can do with it when left to my own devices.


Tonight it was playing around with a photo of a friend just to see if I could make it into something decent:

Movie Mondays!

This is the movie that should have been on the Grindhouse double feature with Planet Terror. It’s not high-art - just tawdry, trashy fun. Christina Ricci’s nymphomania goes up against recently abandoned husband Samuel Jackson's faith and the battle that results is a film that harkens back to the days of the drive in. There is no denying the nubile Ricci, who spends a great majority of the film scantily clad and in compromising positions, found inspiration for her performance from Carroll Baker (Baby Doll). It’s got a great bluesy soundtrack and the heat and steaminess of the south will just leap off the screen at you. Not at all PC but great fun still.

I’m repurposing content by taking my NetFlix reviews and posting them here on the blog. If I could figure out a way to do it, I’d post some kind of link for people to connect and make me their friend on the service. Unfortunately, it isn’t altogether clear how one would do that - so if you know a way, pass it along. In the meantime, I’ve got steady content for at least a year.

I hate dating.

But this has to be the best personal ad ever:



To see the 20  funniest personal ads of all time click through on the ad above.

Isn’t it time?

They made the movie - The Syd Barrett story:

Starring this guy:

I’d go see that.

(The first photo is Syd Barrett - the second photo is Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day)

A day at the musuem!

Seeing Cowboys and Indians (well not so much Cowboys):

Plus there’s an Andy Warhol show up too, Brooklyn Museum is a really cool place and a wonderful place to spend an afternoon! Click through on the image above for some neat shots of the Warhol exhibit and some other beautiful art!

Movie Mondays!

Painful to watch. Charles Carner, who previously worked only in TV, delivers his first feature film. Hopefully, it will be his last. If Carner truly had any sense he would have given over the credit to Alan Smithee if only to distance himself from this tripe. Unfortunately, a good cast is wasted on the flimsiest of material. If you are a Larry the Cable Guy fan you would be better served watching Health Inspector which is actually a funny comedy movie. Avoid at all costs.

I’m repurposing content by taking my NetFlix reviews and posting them here on the blog. If I could figure out a way to do it, I’d post some kind of link for people to connect and make me their friend on the service. Unfortunately, it isn’t altogether clear how one would do that - so if you know a way, pass it along. In the meantime, I’ve got steady content for at least a year.

Old favorites.

Sometimes in life you get a double treat – such was the case when one of my favorite bands wrote the theme music for what would become a favorite television series. I never saw the ‘official’ video for the song until tonight but it’s really great, the song has always been one of my favorites but the video turns out to be just as good:

THE TIME TO VOTE IS NOW!

In just 48 hours voting will end for the All-Star team and as I write this, David Wright is a mere 23,000 votes behind Placido Polanco of the Phillies to be the starting third baseman for the National League squad. If David wins he will be the lone Met on the squad (unless a Mike Pelfrey is picked), a team that currently is the wold card leader in the National League. So, do your part and vote early and often.

Oh, by the way.

There have been a few times over the last few weeks where I’ve heard the following or something along the same lines, “Yeah, well you know it ain’t Obama’s fault... Bush fucked up the country!”

See,  I find this more than a little ironic.

The reason I think it’s ironic is because the people who are saying this are the very same people who laid the entire blame for the events of 9/11 at the feet of Bush too. I didn’t vote for Bush and I was never crazy about the guy but I was always amazed how a segment of the population wanted to pardon Slick Willy for being asleep at the switch.

Total bullshit but, people really did their level best to try and believe it.

And here we are, what? Two months in now on one of the worst environmental catastrophes ever to happen to our country and the very same people who pilloried Bush for his lackluster response to Katrina are making excuses for the Obama administration.


You know, as bad as the Exxon Valdez disaster was, this makes it look like small potatoes and just wait until we get a little deeper in the summer and hurricanes start making appearances in the gulf. This administration simply can’t get it right.


You would think I’m one of the tea-baggers (my slight against the Tea Party folks) but I have little patience for them too. They’re just a different face of the same problem.

This administration brings the good old days to mind... and I write that with the utmost of sarcasm. I haven’t seen this level of incompetence since the Carter administration. There too, the nation was lead by a Chief Executive who, while well-meaning, was ill-equipped to deal with the problems of the day. Two months now, oil has been leaking out into the Gulf - destroying fisheries, impacting the environment, demolishing tourism and throughout the entire debacle this administration has played some bizarre form of catchup, using double speak and hoping for the best.

Katrina was bad but this has the capacity to be longer lasting and more devastating as to make Katrina seem like a minor blip. And more than anything, the administration’s handling of this is emblematic of the incompetence that has been a hallmark of many of the actions they’ve taken.

The funny thing is, there are people who were the most ardent supporters of this administration in the months leading up to the election in 2008, who are now expressing their doubts and unhappiness. The reason they’re doing this is because this administration has been a disappointment. This is an administration that took office on the premise there would be less partisanship and more cooperation in government but time and time again when confronted by a problem of their own making, the current administration tries to foist blame on its predecessors.

The thing is there are some policies while fine on paper, really are unworkable when it comes to dealing with the problems of the real world. The brand of internationalism this administration has practiced has been an utter failure. In foreign policy time and again, the lofty ideals of the Obama administration where the United States builds a consensus and conducts its foreign policy based on the desires and goals of other nations has proven to be unworkable.

Look at North Korea, look at Afghanistan, look at Iran.

And when it does come time to get help from other nations, we turn it away:

The Dutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. “Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour,” Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

But remember, at the end of the day it’s all Bush’s fault. The one asset of this administration is the amazing sense of entitlement and lack of responsibility for their missteps. If there is one retrain that echoes in my mind at the moment, it is: ‘Lord save of from the well-meaning.’

Movie Mondays!

Watching this, I was reminded of LA Confidential. Only later after digging did I realize both stories are by the same author, James Ellroy. It's standard Hollywood fare, a bit of a throwback to the days of Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity. If you liked those movies, you’ll appreciate Black Dahlia otherwise you'll be better off steering clear. I enjoyed it. DePalma is a tremendous student of film and this movie reestablishes his love of the medium. Actors are shot in the diffuse glow popular during the period. Dialog is taut (almost clichéd) but entertaining. It’s film noir for the current Hollywood generation. A seedy story where even the heroes have flaws.

I’m repurposing content by taking my NetFlix reviews and posting them here on the blog. If I could figure out a way to do it, I’d post some kind of link for people to connect and make me their friend on the service. Unfortunately, it isn’t altogether clear how one would do that - so if you know a way, pass it along. In the meantime, I’ve got steady content for at least a year.

Hey, England!

Guess it wasn’t the ball now was it?  The Germans trounced your asses!

An anniversary.

Today’s a big deal in some quarters - it’s the one year anniversary of the death of Michael Jackson and people were commemorating his passing by dressing up as him and playing his music. This I find somewhat strange (and a bit stupid) – people gathering and pretending they’re Michael Jackson is just plain weird. Then again, a lot surrounding Michael Jackson has proven to be weird.

I like the picture above – I like it because this is how I remember Michael Jackson. This is Michael Jackson who sang all those great songs back when I was a teenager (and even before I was a teenager), Michael Jackson who sang the song on the first 45 I ever owned (I Want You Back), the Michael Jackson who had a slew of terrific poppy hits over a few year period.

Anyway, while some people are out there mourning, the collective sphincters of a generation of young boys can finally unclench – as much as people may have loved Michael, there were far too many unanswered questions surrounding him and some of his proclivities to start awarding him sainthood.

Movie Mondays!

Simply amazing. It’s David Lean’s highest grossing movie and outgrossed all his other movies put together - amazing when you realize the two previous Lean films are Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge Over the River Kwai. It is ranked at #39 on AFI’s 100 Years... 100 Movies list and at #7 on AFI’s 100 Years... 100 Passions (a list of the top 100 love stories in American Cinema). Omar Sharif is Doctor Zhivago an idealistic GP caught up in the tide of history as Russia transforms into the Soviet Union. This performance could be considered the apex of Sharif’s career. Geraldine Chaplin is his loving beautiful wife Tonya and Julie Christie is the mystical Lara - a woman who captures Zhivago’s poetic soul. The score is unforgettable and the scope of the film is something we will most probably never see again as this film is such a sweeping epic. If you are a lover of cinema this is an absolute must see and it remains one of the greatest love stories bought to film over the last century. BEAR IN MIND - the running time for Doctor Zhivago is 197 minutes! (that’s a bit over 3 hours). However, it’s all up there on screen and will hold your interest. Certainly it’s the kind of movie that’s perfect for a rainy or cold weekend afternoon when you don’t feel like going out. It is amazing though and you won’t be disappointed. WARNING - THIS IS A TWO SIDED DVD. MIDWAY THROUGH THE FILM YOU WILL BE REQUIRED TO FLIP THE DVD TO CONTINUE WATCHING! Don’t let that stop you from enjoying one of cinema’s best though.

I’m repurposing content by taking my NetFlix reviews and posting them here on the blog. If I could figure out a way to do it, I’d post some kind of link for people to connect and make me their friend on the service. Unfortunately, it isn’t altogether clear how one would do that - so if you know a way, pass it along. In the meantime, I’ve got steady content for at least a year.

Late to the party.

I have little good to say about Twitter but this is one of its rare jewels:

“I hate paying bills... Son, don’t say “me too.” I didn’t say that looking to relate to you. I said it instead of “go away.”

The feed that a William Shatner TV series will be based on, “Shit my dad says.”

Movie Mondays!

David Fincher at his best, directing a solid cast in a story that spans over a decade. This is the tale of San Francisco’s infamous Zodiac killer, who Scorpio (the villain of Clint Eastwood’s first Dirty Harry movie) was loosely based on. Good performances, a great script and excellent direction make this an entertaining thriller you must catch!

I’m repurposing content by taking my NetFlix reviews and posting them here on the blog. If I could figure out a way to do it, I’d post some kind of link for people to connect and make me their friend on the service. Unfortunately, it isn’t altogether clear how one would do that - so if you know a way, pass it along. In the meantime, I’ve got steady content for at least a year.

In keeping with yesterday’s entry.

I give you this:

Busy.

Ive been busy... busy working, busy going out, busy living life.

My next big thing is to learn this web stuff. So I imagine there will be changes around here finally that are well and long overdue. So much is going on in the world around me to people I know, in some ways I feel a bit lucky. There have been times over the last few weeks where things have happened, horrible things, things that make you want to run away but when they happen after that first rush of panic, I generally calm down and say to myself, “Well, things could be worse.”

And last week I was sitting out with a friend and she and I were having coffee. She has a bunch of things she’s trying to juggle herself and at one point she came to realize my own situation and she said, “You deal with that every day!” And I nodded (because I do deal with various crises on a daily basis) but I used my hackneyed refrain once again because I see some of the things that happen to other people and I consider myself lucky I don’t have to deal with their problems.

Anyway, seeing as how it’s Tuesday and I should be writing more regularly here but wonder if it isn’t a futile gesture given the amount of traffic coming down this remote dirt road of the internet I thought it was necessary to put something up. Hope you’re having a good week.

Movie Mondays!

There’s a reason a movie wins a Best Picture Oscar and in the case of NCfOM it is an honor well deserved. The unstoppable force (Javier Bardem) meets the immovable object (Josh Brolin) as chance sets in motion a series of events both chilling and haunting as the landscape (the Texas plains) they play against. Not for the faint of heart, the Coen brothers give us what must be considered the third part in their crime thriller trilogy. A movie arriving like clockwork a dozen years after their last entry, Fargo and double that from the first entry, Blood Simple. All three films, classics of the genre.

I’m repurposing content by taking my NetFlix reviews and posting them here on the blog. If I could figure out a way to do it, I’d post some kind of link for people to connect and make me their friend on the service. Unfortunately, it isn’t altogether clear how one would do that - so if you know a way, pass it along. In the meantime, I’ve got steady content for at least a year.

Movie Mondays!

A laughable movie which reinforces in scene after scene the dysfunction of many Middle Eastern societies. Depicting the events after a man’s death, the viewer is given a view of how his surviving family deals with that death and their daily lives in Iraq. Of course, Americans are the villains of the piece, being infidels and responsible for the world’s evils. Yet, out of the subjects’ mouths, time and time again, spew all manner of hatred, bigotry and sexism. This is a movie laden with irony and is meant to fuel the anger and passion of apologists everywhere but it I found it to be a perfect example of just how naive and ignorant the average Iraqi is. Of course, it’s not just Americans who are villains - it’s Jews, it’s Kurds, it’s non-Muslims... it’s even fellow Muslims if they belong to a different sect. Everyone is guilty but their own leaders, the same leaders who do their level best to whip the crowd into a frenzy by directing anger and dissatisfaction at external forces in the tradition of dictators and tyrants throughout history. We even are treated to a speech by Muqtada al-Sadr, more propaganda spewed under the guise of religion. It’s a very biased view of some very biased people and their daily lives in Iraq, not worth viewing unless you are suffering from a malady sometimes referred to as liberal guilt.

HEY! I’ll even do you a favor - if you must watch this turkey it’s certainly not worth dropping a thin dime on either renting it or god forbid buying it but you can download the thing for free by clicking on this link.


I’m repurposing content by taking my NetFlix reviews and posting them here on the blog. If I could figure out a way to do it, I’d post some kind of link for people to connect and make me their friend on the service. Unfortunately, it isn’t altogether clear how one would do that - so if you know a way, pass it along. In the meantime, I’ve got steady content for at least a year.

The feminist rant.

There are a lot of times I read things and they just make no sense to me or if they do make any kind of sense the words can ring hollow. There is a whole corner of the blogoverse built up around the slights women have to suffer in the world of comics. Aside from the original Women in Refrigerators it is rare I see something I can actually feel is on the money (thank you Gail Simone for one of the most spot on observations made by someone in quite some time).

This is because if you approach a situation with a bunch of preconceived notions you are most likely going to find your suspicions verified. I vaguely remember something I read or heard once about scientific exploration and theory being based around a postulation. The postulation is the starting point and then the experiment itself is just a proof of that postulation.

Sometimes there is feminist rant that has validity but other times it just rings hollow.

Val D’Orazio built a career out of it (feminist rant ringing hollow) - first with the revisionist history autobiographical piece ‘Goodbye to Comcis’ (known by that polished histrionic phrase - Comics Broke My Vagina) but there are others who jump on the bandwagon as well. D’Orazio lost me totally when she dismissed a host of creators on her blog in one fell swoop by stating her gender lacked a Grant Morrison or Alan Moore. She was rewarded for her insult by being designated the President of Friends of Lulu.

Such is the skewed universe we live in where people can’t apologize enough.

I digress though.

Ragnell is someone whose blog I read with regularity because she is an equal opportunity offender. She doesn’t fit nicely into the box of feminist bloggers who write about comics. She wrote something recently about a Star Sapphire outfit, another in a series of revealing costumes for a female character and while she wrote about it with all the righteous rage she could muster I just thought it somewhat funny.

I mean, have you looked at costumes for superheros in the comics? Even the male characters are basically nudes with lines drawn in so I was a little stumped by this one. Somehow the very same people today who rant about these things would have been ready to go after a whole host of Renaissance artists I think.

But there was one line she wrote recently that I really liked. I liked it because with some creative editing and just by moving a period you make a sentence so much more interesting. Just because it takes that whole lunacy of the pretend world of comics, this world that comics fans seem to take way, way too seriously and it turns that on it’s head in a way you would never see. Here it is:

Just like this funeral special didn’t say that Cyclops and Johnny Storm were fucking.

The actual paragraph (or sentence) runs below but I liked just pulling that out for a second because in the way too serious world of comic fandom that one sentence has the potential to cause the most God-awful sh**storm imaginable. The sentence actually reads:

Just like this funeral special didn’t say that Cyclops and Johnny Storm were fucking gossips who should shut their fucking yaps or that Rogue was more upset about recent X-men events than about this guy we never saw her meet.

And the whole post is this long thing about Rogue and some kind of revisionist history thing where she is supposed to have had a relationship with the character Sentry...

Who really gives a f***!

But I just liked pulling that one sentence out of the paragraph for a second because 1) It’s something that never would have occurred to me and 2) That one sentence alone could be an A-Bomb going off in the Marvel Universe.

And if people want to write about how angry things in comics make them, they can but, at the end of the day it’s just much ado about nothing.

Why?

Well two reasons actually.

One - Publishers print what sells, they are motivated purely and simply by the glorious dollar and how much money they can make so if they can make it by perpetuating some kind of libidinous, teenage fantasy they will for as long as the dollars keep coming in.

Two - Get off your ass and produce. Produce, produce and produce some more. Anne Rice doesn’t seem to have much of a problem writing things that sell by the bushel nor does J. K. Rowling and if either of them don’t then why is it we don’t have that in comics?

Publishers are about money, are women or girls a big part of the comics reading audience? If not, is it any surprise publishers aren’t producing more material for that market? This gets into a whole chicken and the egg argument but still it’s not as if there isn’t opportunity or there hasn’t been opportunity and there are a great deal of women creators out there or is it just a matter of everything being measured only by what goes on in the land of the superhero and is that really a good yardstick to measure everything by?

Movie Mondays!

Painful. So heavy handed and one dimensional it lacks all the charm of the first movie Bruce Almighty. Even a decent cast can’t save this turkey. Trying to cash in on Steve Carrell’s success, the movie has a cast of veterans (Lauren Graham, John Goodman, Wanda Sykes, Molly Shannon) and even Morgan Freeman reprising his role as God. Still, the movie has such a flat story the actors are unable to save it.

I’m repurposing content by taking my NetFlix reviews and posting them here on the blog. If I could figure out a way to do it, I’d post some kind of link for people to connect and make me their friend on the service. Unfortunately, it isn’t altogether clear how one would do that - so if you know a way, pass it along. In the meantime, I’ve got steady content for at least a year.

Open your #$%^&*% mouths!

You know as I’ve said before I get a lot of these crap emails from people (although I have seen a dropoff thankfully after I wrote about it). In one sense, I really couldn’t give two craps about a lot of the complaints I hear about the Obama administration – it’s pretty much business as usual for the Federal government. They just keep the circuses going to distract the public and the real problems that plague our society remain unfixed.

One thing has been bothering me of late....

JUST WHERE THE *$&% ARE THESE #&$HOLES WHILE THE GULF OF MEXICO IS BEING TURNED INTO A SUPERFUND SITE!?!?

You know, the government sometimes can be really good about reacting to things but talk about a total failure to take any kind of command of a situation. Thing is, if Bush was in office when this happened they would be crucifying the guy, calling him an idiot, saying he is in the pocket of big oil, the rants would be incessant.

Just where are all these people now I wonder?

This problem has gone on FOR A MONTH! And the Federal government has just sat back and twiddled their thumbs while the problem gets worse and worse and worse and worse. I know it was BPs rig that exploded and it’s BPs problem but with all that oil leaking into the water and washing up on the beaches all across the Gulf coast polluting both the coastline and fisheries who the hell do you think is going to pay?

Even if they fine BP (which they no doubt will), even if BP gets pulled into court with a myriad of law suits (which they will) at the end of the day isn’t the price just too high to pay? And what are these idiots in Washington doing? Shouldn’t the Navy and the Coast Guard be doing everything they can to assist in stopping the problem? Shouldn’t the vast resources of the Federal government be bought to bear with a problem of this magnitude?

Can someone explain to me JUST WHERE ARE THESE IDIOTS? And most of all, WHY IS THE PRESIDENT JUST SITTING ON HIS HANDS?!?

We’re not talking about a day or a week – IT’S BEEN AN ENTIRE MONTH!

WAKE UP YOU CLOWNS! This is going to kill economies all along the Gulf Coast based on the fisheries! In the past I was willing to give the president the benefit of a doubt but I have to say that the response to this event is going to prove to be one of the low points of the Obama presidency. In the meantime I want to know where all the critics of Bush are, where all the eco-warriors are?

YOUR SILENCE IS DEAFENING!