utenzi

I watched two movies last night that I had recorded off of TCM this past week. Yeah, a very exciting Friday night, don't you know. Anyway, the first one was made in 1961, the year I was born. The second one happened to be made one decade later in 1971. There really seemed to be a huge thematic difference between the two and it was partially due to the times in which they were made. The first movie was a Disney flick named The Parent Trap and starred Haley Mills, twice. It was kinda funny watching how clumsy they were dealing with using one actress in two parts on the screen at the same time. Lots of body doubles with the face obscured and in cases where they used Haley on both sides of the screen, the interaction was really forced. Actors today spend a lot of time "interacting" with people and monsters via green screen and they've gotten a lot better at it. Watching Parent Trap was an interesting way to see how they did it way back then. Social values (or at least the...

Work today was a pain in the patootie. A royal pain, at that. Three different crises running in parallel. It was truly a mess. None of them were all that bad and could have been solved in fairly short order --- if only the other two crises would have left me alone for 40 minutes or so. Unfortunately all three took quite a while to solve because the other folk kept calling or Emailing me which forced each problem in turn to worsen while I was taking care of the most recent complainer. Yikes. Fortunately days like this are very rare in my job. Was it a full moon day or something? I was sure glad when I got out of there at 5pm. And after work I went on my second date with.... what name should we give her? Maybe Sybil. That's easy to remember. And this time we had a traditional "dinner and a movie" date. Dinner was Italian at Tarantini Restaurant not far from campus. Sybil had the Fettuccine Alfredo (only $12---gotta love it) and I had the Vitello Parmigiana ($17) and we...

I know a lot of people have a bias against Wal-mart. My message to them: Get over it! For those of you that don't mind doing business with good ole Wallyworld, they have some movies on special right now. There's 10 pre-release films that they're selling for $10 each with free shipping. Pretty sweet. I bought 4 of them as you can see to the left. At 10 bucks, why not? I also bought Season 1 of The Big Bang Theory . The second season is a better deal 'cause there were more shows (17 episodes versus 23) and it costs the same but I saw each episode at least twice due to all the reruns last year. The show wasn't as popular the first year, so less reruns, and so those episodes will be a little fresher for me. The cost savings versus Amazon.com on Big Bang was only something like $2 but the 4 movies cost about $7 more on Amazon, so the total savings was $30 minus the$4.48 for local taxes. And each movie is shipped free as soon as it's released. Sweet. If it wasn...

I was more productive than usual this weekend. First off, I did a lot of cleaning and tidying around the house in prep for leaving the house for a week or so at Christmas. I don't know why people tend to clean when they're about to leave for a while---you'd think it'd be more important while you're there---but everyone seems to do it. I guess it's like washing the car before a big trip. While I don't do that, I know a lot of people who do---and the damn car is just going to get dirty while driving so by the time you arrive, it looks just like it did before you started on the trip. Go figure. I also went hiking with Julie on Sunday. We did that hike along Morgan Creek with all the sewer pipe crossings. That's Julie waving at the camera on top of one of the pipes. It was a great day for the hike despite the wet conditions---it was raining pretty hard on Saturday---and slightly cold temperatures. Between the sun and the fresh scrubbed creek banks everythin...

I've been buying a few songs this week for a CD I'm making for my car. I want to cover a variety of eras, starting with the 1950s. A little while before I was born, but an era I'm familiar with due to seeing a number of movies like American Graffiti and American Hot Wax that were based in the 1950s. American Hot Wax included a performance by budding actor Jay Leno. He's better known now for his comedy and television skills than acting-- and if you watch American Hot Wax you'll see why he changed his vocational focus. The movie also had Fran Drescher and a walk-on part by Cameron Crowe, who was just a teenager in the 1978 movie. Reading about the stuff going on during the filming of American Graffiti as well as how difficult it was for George Lucas to sell the concept to a studio was interesting. The cast of the film just staggers the mind: Ron Howard was well known but Richard Dreyfuss, Paul Le Mat, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie P...

Lee left a few hours ago for home. My place seems far too empty now. :-( Here's a picture from our Saturday trip to Duke University. That's the Duke Chapel in the background. The campus has a Gothic theme and while it can be heavy handed at times, the theme does look nice on the chapel. Somehow churches and Gothic just seem to go together. Lee's leaving is the reason for "departure" in my post title, the "nasty" refers to a movie we watched on Sunday. We'd just finished brunch (french toast style biscuits, maple sausage + grilled onions and egg scramble, and juice in case you're curious) and sat down to watch a movie. Neither of us had seen the third movie in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise so we decided to give it a look. It was sooooo boring. We kept stopping it and looking at one another in amazement. How could a 250 million dollar Summer action blockbuster be so damn slow and boring? We never finished. I think we made it to around t...

Lee and I watched a number of movies this past week while she was visiting. For me the most memorable was Bridge to Terabithia . I'm too old to have been familiar with the book as a child, but I was quite impressed with the movie. For a while it seems just like standard fare for the 10-15 age group but around the middle the film starts to show its legs a bit and when Bridge to Terabithia takes a serious turn near the end you can tell it's in the home stretch--and it's a winner. The cast did a wonderful job. Josh Hutcherson and Anna Sophia Robb played the two kids at the center of the movie and they were just fantastic. The portrayal of the Aarons family, with their warts and blemishes quite evident, was inspired. This movie did not settle for mere saccharine sentimentality. That crap was left up on Walton's Mountain. We also saw a movie she liked a lot, Little Miss Sunshine, but that one didn't grow on me at all. There were a number of times in the movie when I l...

With the exception of a few hours I had to put in at work yesterday I've been either watching tv or cleaning up the clutter in my house this weekend. My de-cluttering goal this weekend is mostly getting rid of bunches of magazines all about the place. Yesterday I brought two 19" CRT monitors in to be recycled which really helped the clutter situation but not so much my lower back. The damn things weigh 75 - 80 pounds each. Contrast that to my new 56" television that weighs about the same amount but is 3 times bigger. And my tv is a DLP, a non-projection unit would weight 20 pounds less. Not having those two 19" monitors hanging around helps appearances. The house looks tidier already. :-) On the watching tele front, I managed to watch the last 8 episodes of Deadwood, season 3, this weekend as well as Transformers (from the library) and 300. I'm really sad that they only went 3 seasons with Deadwood. The characters in that series seemed so real. Often obnoxiou...

Here's a great offer from AMC Theaters, which unfortunately isn't available where I live. AMC Theaters is offering See all Best Picture Nominees (5 Movies + Unlimited Popcorn + Collectible Pass) for $30 at select Theaters. Michael Clayton There Will Be Blood Atonement Juno No Country for Old Men It's on Saturday February 23rd. If you're interested in going, it'll keep you busy all day long.

Most of us have a few movies that we really like--if not now, at some time in our lives--that are really, really bad. One of my favorites back in my 20s was on VH1 Classic tonight. Eddie and the Cruisers . It came out in '83 the year that I graduated college. Back then MTV and VH1 actually played music--what a concept! Music video channels that bothered to play music videos--and the Eddie and the Cruisers soundtrack was all over those channels. On the Darkside was played the most but Season in Hell was very good as well. Watching it now, I have to admit the acting wasn't very good, maybe atrocious would be accurate, but I still like the songs. And the mood while overwrought was very good for that age. Early 20s is a time for being overwrought. The movie doesn't speak as well to me now that I'm in my 40s though. Another favorite schlocky movie is Highlander and I still like that one. I just watched it a week ago, in fact. Christopher Lambert can't act as well as y...

Do you ever have moments, while reading a book or watching a movie, when you just cringe because you sense that a scene, or even just an isolated detail, just shouldn't be there? That happens to me a lot. Last night I watched Speed for the umpteenth time. It's a very nice entertaining movie --despite Keanu Reeves typical wooden performance-- but there's this one scene that always annoys me. When the bus "jumps" over the gap in the highway the front end rises way up in the air right as it takes off. Now that's what you see when a biological critter jumps because just before you jump you spring upwards so you'll go further. I don't see how a bus could do that. LOL Buses don't pop wheelies all on their own. A scene in The Last King of Scotland struck me the same way. Near the beginning of the movie, the young Scottish doctor, due to unusual circumsances, finds himself treating Idi Amin . While the injury is small--just a sprained wrist--the nearby b...