movies

It feels like I live in Alaska or something — it’s only quarter-past five and already full-on dark night outside. What’s up with that? It’s been pretty damn chilly lately. Well. Chilly for Los Angeles, at least. It’s mildly annoying because if I turn on the heater in my apartment I have to take my diploma off the wall in my bedroom and stick it behind one of my night tables. I have it hanging directly above the in-floor oil furnace that passes for a heating unit. The heater actually works amazingly well, and quickly. My apartment can go from freezing (okay, mid-40s) to broiling in about ten minutes from that thing. But I worry that I’m going to warp, spindle, or mutilate my diploma, so …

Anyway. I saw Prime last week. Forgot to mention that. It was pretty good. I’d give it four stars just on acting and direction, but the writing fell flat in places, and it didn’t really have a decent ending, so it’s just a three-star film in my book. Of course, I have no book. I also have no standard star-based ranking of anything, so take that with a grain of salt.

Last night I used LimeWire — wonderful tool — and Google to finally get around to finding the version of “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” that plays at the end of Die Hard. It’s by Vaughn Monroe, by the way.

Saw the new Johnny Cash biography, Walk the Line last night. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon did a fine job of channelling Cash and June Carter. (I’m impressed that the actors did all their own singing, but I can’t understand why the soundtrack has the actors instead of the original songs.) The movie is a must-see if you are a Johnny Cash fan. If you’re not a fan, then you’re probably a commie-loving, Al-Qaeda operative and get the hell off my web site.

I haven’t written anything meaningful in a while, so why start now? Here’s some quick notes from me, because I know you care.

1. The poll question on ESPN’s college football page is, “Who will win Saturday’s showdown in South Bend?” As of quarter-past eleven Sunday night, 58% of the voters are picking Notre Dame. As much as I love Weis’ Wunderkids, as much as I love an underdog, as much as I loved Rudy, as much as I love a good upset, and as much as I would love someone to take down the Trojans … I live in LA. I get to watch USC every week. USC is ridiculously good. USC is better than Florida was in 95-96, and that’s a tough thing to admit. USC is going to beat the tar out of Notre Dame.
2. In Her Shoes is a terrific movie. It’s well-written, the acting is superb, the soundtrack is good, the plot is lovely, and you get to see a lot of Cameron Diaz skin.
3. If you are not winning by more than a touchdown with less than a minute on the clock, do not fool yourself into thinking you’ve beaten the Patriots.
4. A History of Violence is bad. It is pathetically bad. It is painfully bad. The plot is actually pretty darn good. The acting, writing, soundtrack, editing, and hell even the title fonts are wretched. I am seriously considering writing William Hurt and Viggo Whatsisname and asking for $21.50. Spend an hour and a half picking up dog crap around your neighborhood rather than seeing it.
5. Grey’s Anatomy is almost as good as West Wing.

This week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback includes a delicious link to college football’s funniest fight song. It also includes the best football commentary on the web, and a little bit about that lovable V’Ger, from the first Star Trek movie.

This weekend I finally finished Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. It was a terrific read, truly wonderful. Bryson managed to make even the most esoteric, incredibly — for lack of a better word — boring details about life on this planet inconceivably fascinating. I mean really, it takes a brilliant author to get you completely engrossed in plate tectonics, genome theories, and the Brownian motion of subatomic particles. I’m not a very good test subject, actually, because I tend to find these types of things amazing and fun even when presented in incredibly bland tomes on them, but I have to tell you that even if you aren’t even barely interested in glaciers or the lipids that comprise your cell walls, this book will enthrall you.

I also just recently finished “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers” by Mary Roach. This book, too, was just so damn fun to read. A bit morbid, to be sure, but Roach approaches everything with a bent towards comedy and I enjoyed it.

And lastly I should mention that my girlfriend and I managed to catch March of the Penguins on Friday night. If it doesn’t win an Academy Award — or two or three or four — I will be astonished.

We went to see Mr. & Mrs. Smith tonight at the AVCO on Wilshire in Westwood. It was great! I wasn’t expecting much, but (a) the trailers were funny, (b) both stars are dead sexy, and (c) LA has been deluged with posters, and we — as simple drones — just can’t resist such a zealous marketing campaign. (Pay attention for the many homages made throughout the film; for example, a supporting character is wearing a “Fight Club” t-shirt at one point.)

[click to continue...]

I saw the 8:30pm showing at the AMC 14 in the Century City mall. I somehow managed to avoid seeing even one preview during the last three or four months. It was good. It was beyond good. It was nothing like Episode I or Episode II, and it was everything like Episodes IV, V, and VI. You will not be disappointed.

Grab the new Song of the Moment!

I suppose $499.99 is a bit too much to pay for a toy at my age … even if it would be the absolute coolest toy in the history of all time … even if it would be a toy I dreamt of owning for the better part of the first half (fifteen years) of my life … even if it would be something that would, perhaps, escalate me to Level III.

What is sad is that it is a toy that I could probably never explain to my (potential) children. It’s a toy that even now is likely only understood by an ever-shrinking number of still-awestruck twenty-five to forty-one year olds. It’s so, so difficult to explain a revolution to those either too young to have known the world before it or too unlike you to care.

Here are two just absolutely brilliant quotes from the recent Wired Magazine interviews with George Lucas:

“With film, if you get a million people to see your movie on the first weekend, you’ve made about $5 million. That basically will not end up on the top-10 chart,” he told me. “You have to get 10 million people on the first weekend. And if you don’t do it in two days, you’re basically out of the theaters and into the DVD market. There’s just an ecology there. If you’re a mouse, don’t expect to kill a lion, because it ain’t gonna happen. If you want to have that kind of power, it’s better to be a lion, because the mice are fine - you can have a life and everything - but the lions are the ones out there prowling and scaring the hell out of everybody.”

“If you’ve raised children, you know you have to explain things to them, and if you don’t, they end up learning the hard way. In the end, somebody’s got to say, “Don’t touch that hot skillet.” So the old stories have to be reiterated again in a form that’s acceptable to each new generation. I don’t think I’m ever going to go much beyond the old stories, because I think they still need to be told.”

Awesome. MSNBC is doing a comedy movie version of March Madness. (bracket here) You really get screwed in a couple of places — being forced to choose between incredibly funny movies very early: Animal House vs. Austin Powers, Fletch vs. Wayne’s World, Swingers vs. Best in Show, for example. When I was forced to choose between favorites, I went with the “laugh-out-loud” factor. My personal tourney finished like this:

1. Vacation over Bull Durham
   1. Bull Durham over Airplane
   2. Bull Durham over Office Space
2. Vacation over Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
   1. Vacation over Old School
   2. Old School over Beverly Hills Cop

It was painful to try to choose between Old School and Ghostbusters! I don’t think it was fair to have a Saturday Night Live bracket and force them all to compete so early. I also can’t agree that When Harry Met Sally and Dr. Strangelove are even in the mix … Great movies, to be sure, but I don’t see how they’d make it into the top 64 comedies of all time. WHMS is more of a generic “chick-flick” than a comedy, and DS is really only funny in a non-funny way. But I guess that’s why we have brackets, right? Who’s your winner?
link via a small victory

I had a great Easter weekend.

• Dinner at La Loggia’s Friday night. (Inexplicably sans web site for linking. A great restaurant in Studio City. Don’t sit in the patio area if you can help it.)
• A fairly uneventful but relaxing Saturday topped off by The Upside of Anger. (A wonderful flick, I loved it.)
• Fell asleep watching Pierce Brosnan’s stint on Inside the Actors Studio.
• Up at 6 for a long-overdue 3.2 mi run on Sunday.
• Mass at Church and then dinner with the gf’s ‘rents followed by The Incredibles. (What a terrific movie! I can’t believe I waited so long to see it!)
• I also started reading The Promise of a Lie by Howard Roughan. (Only about 150 pages so far, but it has me hooked enough to continue.)
• Using the magic that is TiVo, a co-worker of mine recorded Green Day’s performance on Last Call with Carson Daly and we managed to rip it to DVD and then mp3, so for the hell of it, I uploaded for you an awesome live version of Jesus of Suburbia from American Idiot.
• For the grand finale I organized the rest of my ‘04 receipts and bank statements while listening to classic late 80s hair bands.

Okay. This is just ridiculous. The Starship Captain Smackdown is an awesome display of a spreadsheet on an HTML page, and ranking starship commanders is a noble goal. But you’ve got Solo ranked below the new Adama? Please. Even the old Adama was cooler than the new Adama. And sure, Galactica is the Samuel L. Jackson of spaceships … but voting anything even on par with the Falcon is just plain blasphemy.

One of the glaring signals to me that I’m much older than I think I am is that I can no longer easily distinguish events from my past. I was going to write about something and I realized that I cannot remember if it happened five or ten years ago. The very fact that there is even the slightest chance of me thinking that a decade and a half-decade are not too different is frightening.

[click to continue...]