Monday, April 03, 2006

Having a rough day...?

Perhaps a few laughs will help. =)


Thanks to Paris Jen for pointing me to this over the weekend. I kinda needed it.

Keep on keepin on~

Thursday, March 30, 2006

16 BLOCKS...

Saw 16 BLOCKS tonight with Glen. If you're looking for a fun action flick, definitely check it out. Bruce Willis and Mos Def are a great unlikely pair, perhaps Hollywood formula-ish, but hey, formulas become formulas because they work, right? And these guys both bring their own unique flavors to the familiar recipe, an oddball riff on LETHAL WEAPON-ness, with Willis as an over-the-hill detective with nothing to lose, Def as the hapless lowlife screw-up who can make the prosecution's case against a group of cops gone bad...

I actually, finally, didn't feel like laughing at David Morse in the role of the bad guy heavy in this. I can't remember every time I've seen him play assassin or thug or destined-to-go-postal (I *do* remember him in that Hackman/Hughes/Sarah Jessica COMA update... EXTREME MEASURES?), but it seems like I've seen him do it a LOT (OH, he was also in 12 MONKEYS, but in a better fitting role), and almost every time, I've found him to be hard to buy as dangerous or scary.

I know some of that comes from my first imprinting of him being the quiet doctor on ST. ELSEWHERE, who was not a bad guy, soft spoken, a good man, sadly, by the harshest of misfortunes, driven to a bit of madness, but not a bad guy. I think he's been picked for these hitman type roles because he's not the guy you'd expect to be the dangerous one, which of course makes him exactly the guy you expect to be the dangerous one, right? He is picked to play up the "quiet guy, keeps mostly to himself" idea of menacing. Well, I just never bought it. He seems more mannequin in those roles than killing machine. In BLOCKS, tho, he gets to be all personality, That Guy, smart, ready with the patter in the tensest of situations, connected to other human beings. I really think he plays this buddy-buddy guy who goes bad much better than the cold blank stare killing type.

ST. ELSEWHERE. Does any station anywhere carry that show anymore? Denzel, Harmon, Begley, frickin DEAL OR NO DEAL glove-on-the-head Mandel, and the voice of KITT! *sigh* What a great show that was, dayumn! I think it was channel 38 here in Boston, before it became the UPN a decade or so ago, they would play ELSEWHERE and CHEERS whenever they had a gap in their programming that wasn't bought up for infotisement. Beantown pride.

I don't think they ever played GOODNIGHT, BEANTOWN, tho. Go figure. I miss ya, Bill B. Who else ever held his own opposite The King and the Hulk?

Hrmm... I was talking about... What was I talking about? Oh yeah! 16 BLOCKS... How to boil it down into a synopsis...?

Oh, I know! I sent Glen an email listing movie options downtown. Let's see how I put it then...
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I'd see...

STAY ALIVE @ 8
Video game that kills its players in real life the way they die in the game, only at fewer frames per second, and fewer polygons.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING @ 7.55
Dark comedy about a lobbyist for big tobacco trying to be the good guy AND do his job in the face of mounting evidence that smoking kills. Obviously fiction.

HILLS HAVE EYES @ 7.45
Family mutated by atomic bomb testing likes to eat visitors.

16 BLOCKS @ 8
Good cop/detective Bruce Willis has to get witness-against-bad-cops Mos Def, across town to testify. The rest of the police force is against them.

ULTRAVIOLET @ 8
Milla Jovovich is a supermodel superweapon that superkills supereverybody. Also, she's the only thing standing between superfreedom and supertyranny, like all supermodels. Based on a true story.

Any of that look good to you?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

V FOR VENDETTA and INSIDE MAN were not on the list because I'd seen them already. For full price at Boston Common ($9.75 I think?) I wanted to see something new.

By the way, both flicks are excellent. V is definitely more excellent, tho. If you're in a situation where you have to choose - see V first. When you get out of that, flip a coin to decide whether to sneak into INSIDE MAN or 16 BLOCKS.

Anyhow, Glen came back to me with STAY ALIVE or 16 BLOCKS, and I had to go with BLOCKS. I *know* STAY ALIVE is gonna be crap, even with Adam Goldberg as one of the gamer victims, and if I'm gonna pay full price for a show, I'd rather it was better than crap.

(I saw DOOM at a matinee.)

Not that DOOM was crap...

Cuz it's actually a pretty satisfying spam-in-a-space-cabin action flick with a couple of creative kills and one very entertaining "first person shooter" segment, heh...

I just, y'know... couldn't be sure of that before seeing it...

I'm just sayin =)

16 BLOCKS! I highly recommend it for an adrenaline fixx with much more heart than you'd expect. Maybe even smarmy for a moment or three, but those moments balanced against the rest of the cat-and-mouse action are just right. There are some clever little twists to keep things interesting, but nothing you haven't seen before. They're well employed here is all.

You'll likely find the affectations Mos Def bestows upon his character Eddie's voice and speechifying a bit annoying, but except for losing a couple of lines of dialogue to apparent mumbliness, it's worth enduring to get to know Eddie.

Kind of interesting, maybe not really Important - and the marketing doesn't push the idea - but from my reckoning of the events in the movie, versus the length of the experience of watching the movie, most of the film seems to happen "in real time," y'know? A la 24 and NICK OF TIME (Johnny Depp vs. Christopher Walken a few years back). Just a little interesting thing...

After the movie Glen gave me the dumbest headache. I got a ride home from him, and when dropping me off, he started talking about how he doesn't get how people can be allowed to park in a bus stop space in front of my building. The T bus stop sign has another sign on the same post that says "NO PARKING" with some conditions written below it. I explained that you can park there only for certain hours, when the bus isn't running. So he looks at the sign a little more closely, and says, "6am to 7pm except Saturday and Sunday." Or was it "weekends?" I'm not sure.

So he says that a few times out loud...

(You can see it coming, can't you?)

"Wait, 6am to 7pm... EXCEPT Saturday and Sunday... Does that mean I CAN park here on the weekend? No, I can park here EXCEPT then, right? No, but I CAN park here when it's NOT 6am to 7pm, so EXCEPT that would be that I CAN park... What does that mean?"

I wasn't about to try to explain/parse that out for Glen. I got out of the car, said "Good night," and walked away into my building.

I'm not sure how the sign copy would be correctly diagrammed and factored out, but I'm sure it wil match what I do know - that cars are parked in the bus stop space overnight on weeknights and all day and night on weekends and don't get ticketed or towed.

Keep on keepin on~

"But you can be smart every day!"
--- Mos Def, as Eddie, 16 BLOCKS.

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Q: You know what would be really great with some vanilla ice cream...?

A: This apple strudel Pop-Tart I'm snackin on.

Toasted up they smell all apple pie. Or maybe it's apple strudel, if I knew exactly what apple strudel was. Have I had apple strudel? I really cannot recall.

Anyhow, they are VERY tasty, especially for Pop-Tarts. My longtime standby fave flaves have been strawberry frosted (or is that frosted strawberry?) and chocolate frosted (again w the reverse wordage question...). Gotta say though, that apple strudel tops them both. Even with a point or two off for crumbliness - I'm not sure if it's from the bready part, which maybe they've turned into something more pie crusty, or from the flavor bits (pardon the technical jargon) on the outside, y'know, embedded in the drizzled frosting/sugar.

Really, would be a perfect mix-in or smoosh-in. Damn lactose intolerance!

I suppose I could smoosh-in some lactaid pills with it, tho.

Just sayin~

I also really dig their bitterfilmsy squiggly stick figure promotional art and animation. Y'know, dinosaur at the breakfast table? Apparently they're pushing some kind of webisodes at the Pop-Tarts site that I'm just not ready to commit myself to. (I've still got half a season of OC and V.MARS saved and unwatched! =)

Keep on keepin on~

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

tonight at the Brattle!

Was originally expecting to spend the evening at the office, but it turns out that tomorrow will be the late night. Now I've got my Tuesday night free... What to do...? What to do...?

=)

Anyone wanna catch a double feature? BREAKING NEWS - A 2004 Hong Kong cops vs. robbers adrenaline fixx - and THE PRESIDENT'S LAST BANG - a 2005 South Korean political dark comic conspiracy thriller (non-fiction) at the Brattle tonight, starting w the 7.30pm show?

Let me know if you can. =)

Keep on keepin on~

I WILL NOT EAT THINGS FOR MONEY...




I first saw the live-action version of the SIMPSONS intro at Josh's site a few weeks back. It was up multiple times at YouTube back then, but I didn't see any definitive or authoritative explanation or credit for the ingenious and inspired bit of work. The one thing I feel I miss in the live-action version is seeing the readout from Maggie being scanned at the supermarket cashier. Not vital, but just a lost opportunity for some extra fun with the material.

Anyhow...

Tonight, after Monday volleyball w "Say My Name," Steve and I hit the Greenbriar for a drink and some pizza with some other BVA-types. At one point conversation jumped around from "It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time" to the SIMPSONS intro. JJ mentioned it first. Turned out that no one else had seen it besides us. At the time, I figured JJ must have caught it online, like I did, but now, I'm thinking that perhaps he didn't catch it on the internetz, cuz...

This week, I saw it again...

As the SIMPSONS show opener on Sunday night!

Okay, specifically, I watched it just a half hour or so ago, as the actual show opener to this Sunday night's (March 26) episode, saved on my replayTV. Was sweet seeing it at TV resolution, altho a little compromised, I think, by the TV ratio, vs. the letterbox form it's been in online (I only noticed because I couldn't see live-action Smithers next to Mr. Burns checking his watch - there was one other difference I noticed, too...).

I did a little digging and found that the short was intentionally placed on YouTube as viral promotion for a UK TV station's SIMPSONS publicity campaign. It apparently received Matt Groening's blessing, and was tapped for use as the show's intro this week. Produced by a UK ad/media firm, and presumably, shot in the UK, you'll see that Marge is in the driver's seat on the right side of the car in the online versions. However, in the opener on Sunday night, that shot is flipped left-right, so that Marge appears to be driving the American way.

For whatever reason, Homer is in the driver's seat on the left side in both versions. Go figure.

Being UK-produced, it's a perfect intro for an episode written by and starring Ricky Gervais, creator, writer, and star of the Empire's original THE OFFICE series (as opposed to the Colonies', starring Steve Carell).

Dadgum evening volleyball league... Muckin w my metabolism and keeping me wakesy in the wee hours. Will be a fine TIRED day at the office tomorrow. Hohum.

Keep on keepin on~

Sunday, March 26, 2006

got my 1000 friends...

MySpace.com. It's been showing up in random sectors of my radar in the last six months or so. The first memorable non-newzy/non-promotional hit was a smartalec remark by Jill to Rachel that went something like, "Oh, probably cuz you were busy dolling up your MySpace account..."

That does seem to be the way I've heard it refered to most often. As an addictive time sink.

Well, a friend of mine caught me over IM recently and actually got me to visit the site for an anonymous trial run (which means I signed up and put in no personal info, but had a look around at what appear for the most part to be the resurrection of the crappiest geocities and tripod personal pages I've ever seen). I dunno. I can see what it is, and what it sorta does, but I'm not feeling a tractor beam pulling me in...

Yet.

Heh, still, the kids seem to love it.

Friendster's too "gay" to be cool, reports THE DAILY SHOW's Demetri. Ha - I LOVE that kids-love/old-people-hate flip bar chart! =)

My friend Shawn recently explained to me that MySpace.com has become a de facto "background check" resource of sorts for the authorities and institutional authority-types. Sure enough, I see this bit of news (that link's dead, here's a diff one to coverage of the same story) online tonight. She mentioned a news story about a gay student being expelled from a Christian university, outed once his MySpace was discovered. She also mentioned that employers are using it to check out prospective hires and check up on current employees.

[Found out it was facebook.com that led to that student's dismissal for a semester at John Brown U...]

Woohoo, go-o-o-o-o interweb!

The odd little conjunction of stories on MySpace and social networking spurred me to leave this dropping on my bloglawn here, but I dunno how to explain it exactly... I haven't been much in the writing frame of mind of late.

I'll attempt a bit of summ-up...

Work's gotten busy. Pulling some late and weekend hours to keep things on schedule with a project.

Haven't seen any movies in the last month except for V FOR VENDETTA (like the MATRIX, but in a different flavor - SEE IT! - I've been wanting to but havent' managed to rally to conjure up a rave review for it... soon, I hope) and INSIDE MAN (just caught that today, dig it mucho, stil percolating on it).

I'm not feeling tip-top at vball. I think I've gained a dozen pounds from not playing for those weeks off for my ankle, and on top of that being not happy about not playing, bleah. Still, the ankle is feeling better, not worse. Except for one bad misstep, Thursday fours this past week felt pretty good. This week will be a bit of a gauntlet. Playing Monday night 6's, Thursday 4's, the Friday night BVA fundraiser tourney, and Saturday at a CR tournament somewheres.

TV's been pretty good to me. We did a 4-hour 24 Tuesday marathon two weeks ago. That's really just about how the show should be watched, in four hour blocks. Pretty satisfying, altho that particular block was full of some tough hits (Edgar and Tony).

I just watched the last two SHIELDs this evening - brilliant and mean. Poor weasel Shane. I suspected how it would go w Lemanski, but y'know, he didn't even call Vic and whatzhishead to tell them to meet at the abandoned body shop. Pre-frickin-meditated. Dayumn.

I'm due for a second viewing of the BSG finale soon. I re-read my blog on it and realized I pretty much skipped over the Roslyn election fix, and then coming clean. I'm not sure that I need to say anything about it, but, well, for me, it was some good, anxious, television. Ready to be getting away with it, being confronted with it, knowing full well the consequences of owning up, and then stepping up and stepping down... Yeah, definitely gonna hafta watch that again.

Rowan and I are hunting for a new home. We've seen a dozen or so different places in the Cambridge and Somerville area and found two, maybe three, that we can actually stand. See, next season our little UPN comedy will be jumping the shark when my sister joins the regular cast. We're shopping around together with the intent of getting a place for Rowan and my sister, and myself, all together. We figure together we'll be able to afford a better place than we would separately.

Also, they can cook.

Keep on keepin on~

The best thing I ever heard:
"Mr. T...? Actually, it's Mr. T-E-A, like the drink... He's an Asian guy, who likes ginseng..."
--- Demetri Martin on THE DAILY SHOW's "Trendspotting."