This Should Work

If you haven’t heard, my wife and I are moving from Kentucky back to Ohio. She got a once-in-a-lifetime job offer that she couldn’t pass up, so we are heading back to Central Ohio this summer.

While this was a tough decision for our family, telling our friends was evening harder. We’ve made some great friends in this state and it really devastated some of them. One in particular was my friend Tracy; we’d see movies together that our significant others had little or no interest in seeing. Some of these include Grindhouse and No Country for Old Men.

But now he’s lost in movieland without me and has setup a blog called Movies Without Carter. It’s pretty funny stuff.

One of the movies he saw with his significant other: Then She Found Me. Never heard of it, don’t plan on seeing it.

Sorry, Tracy.

but I didn’t pee myself.

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It’s a small step in the direction of Stormtroopers on Speeder bikes. Someone in the UK invented a helmet to help bikers with asthma breath better ( and look cool/scary while doing so).

Similar to the Lost personality test, Liquid Generation has created a personality test for the Star Wars Fans.

Apparently, I resemble Qui-Gon Jinn from EpisodeOne. I’m a level-headed cool guy who gets a light saber run through my mid-section by a Darth Maul like dude. Click the image below to try it yourself.

While flying back from California last weekend I was served United’s Cheez-it-esque crackers Plane Cheesy. While snacking on these treats I thought of two things:

Will the in-flight movie ever be Snakes on a Plane?

Since Snakes on a Plane was such a failure, who thought Zombies on a Plane would make a better movie?

Have you ever tried to explain your dreams to someone? If so it may go something like this:

I had this weird dream last night where (CHOOSE THE NAME OF SOMEONE IN YOUR LIFE) was at my house, but it wasn’t really my house. We were talking about (CHOOSE A RANDOM SUBJECT) when they got up and walked into what should have been the kitchen, but it turned into (CHOOSE THE NAME OF SIGNIFICANT PLACE YOU KNOW). And there were some other things, but I can’t remember the whole thing, I just remember feeling (PICK AN EMOTION).

That’s kinda how I would describe Michel Gondry’s new movie The Science of Sleep: I had trouble following the narrative, but the emotional feelings stayed with me. The story is relatively simple: A man, Stephane played by Gael Garica Bernal, tries to court a woman, Stephanie played by Charlotte Gainsburg. But Stephane -as his mother puts it- confuses his dreams with reality which lead to some mis-steps in his courtship of Stephanie.

This blurring of real and dream life is what make it hard to follow the narrative thread of the film. Characters quickly switch between speaking English, Spanish, and French-sometimes in mid-sentence. Sometimes Stephane will walk through a door and go from the real-world into the dream-world.

Early in the film Stephane says “in dreams, emotions are overwhelming” and it’s the emotions in that fill every frame in this film. It seems that Gondry and company are less worried about the audience following the narrative thread and more concerned with us following the emotional thread of the characters. In fact the emotions that this film stirs up were so overwhelming for me that I would have cried on my way out of the theater if not for the scene that awaited me in the theater lobby.

Stephane says that dreams are made up of many things: randomness, things from your past, events from your day, “friendships, relationship, and all those ships.” The scene that awaited me in the lobby was very random, had elements of my childhood, and reminded me of something I was reading about earlier in the day.

I opened the door to the lobby and saw a packed room people with TV cameras and photographers gathered around an Asian woman with a rolled up poster in one hand. The some people in the crowd had their cellphone cameras ready for some big unveiling. The woman unrolled the poster and the crowd cheered. I moved around to try and see what the woman was holding up; it was a movie poster for Transformers: The Movie -not the new one coming out next year, but the 1986 animated movie. I then noticed that pretty much every person in the crowd was a white guy, between the ages of 25 and 35, slightly overwieght, wearing leather jackets and Optimus Prime T-shirts. I then remembered reading something in our school paper about a conference going on in town, BotCon, a Transformers convention.

There were some other Transformer things happening in the lobby, but I don’t remember exactly what they were. I just remember feeling uncomfortable.

image from imdb.com

If you’re in a hurry or have ADD, here’s my one sentence review of DePalma’s The Black Dahlia:

Not even gratuitous shots of Hillary Swank’s and Josh Harnett’s asses could save this debacle of a movie.

Here’s the longer review:
I was looking forward to seeing this film because the script was based on a James Ellroy novel (who wrote LA Confidential) and was directed by Brian DePalma (Scarface and Carlito’s Way), the cast was okay (which included Harnett, Swank, Scarlett Johansson, and Aaron Eckhart) but I thought the writer and director could still make magic with this crew.

I was wrong. This film about a gruesome Hollywood murder in 1947 meanders so much that at one point I forgot that I was watching a mystery movie about a murdered woman, worse yet some of the side stories and sub-plots were more interesting than the mystery of the Black Dahlia.

And the actors in this film were trying too hard make this a noir film which only ended up making lines that should have been snappy Dasheill Hammett-like dialog came across as forced and contrived.

Early in the film Scarlett Johansson has a line about an upcoming charity that her boyfriend Blanchard (played by Eckhart) is in where she says:

For the union’s sake I hope it’s a good fight.
For everyone’s sake I hope you two look good with your shirts off.

This snappy line should have sounded smart and witty- instead one can see Johansson working up to this line trying to sound saucy and when she delivers it, it falls flat. I kept thinking of the dialog in the film Brick which has the snappy dialog and the actors pull off the lines.

Also the mystery of the Dahlia (which was never solved in real life) is revealed not by detective working on the case, but by a crazed wife who spews a long veiled monologue before she kills herself. I know that many mysteries need a good wrap up so that the audience have a concise understanding of what happened, but this line should be delivered by one of main characters the audience has been following through the film and not a minor character who we’ve only seen once before.

This film had potential, but is hardly worth seeing (unless you’re into seeing rear-ends of Swank and Harnett).

image from washingtonpost.com

[tags]The Black Dahlia[/tags]

That’s my new mantra/philosophy when playing baksetball- a line from Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights are my words to live by on the basketball court.

This new credo just started this week-Tuesday to be exact- when I was shooting hoops at the gym. For the past three months I’ve built playing basketball into my workout routine, and I’ve been making maybe 25% of my shots. I’ve been working on my form and shot technique over this time and I wasn’t seeing any increase in my shot percentage.

Every time I was at the free-throw line I would think ‘OK, feet should length apart, bend the knees, elbow in, extend, and follow through, and…’ Airball! Shooting from the three-point arc was the same process ‘Alright, get your feet under you, jump, extend, follow through, and…’ Brick!

On Tuesday, while standing at the free-throw line I was thinking about some of the NBA players who will mutter a line to themselves before shooting the ball. So I thought ‘I’m not going to think about shooting the ball, I’m just going to shoot it. Ricky Bobby is not a thinker, Ricky Bobby is a driver’ and…swish! I returned to the freethrow line and mumbled “Ricky Bobby is not a thinker, Ricky Bobby is a driver” and…swish, again. I made 7 free-throws in a row. I then tried this technquie from other points on the court, just before shooting the ball I would think ‘Ricky Bobby is not a thinker, Ricky Bobby is a driver’ and the ball would go in.

I tried it yesterday as well with similar results: 5 free-throws in a row went in (twice), 4 consecutive three-pointers, 5 consecutive shots from random spots on the court.

From now on I’ll remember “Ricky Bobby is not a thinker, Ricky Bobby is a driver.”

Sunday night I saw Snakes On A Plane and found it to be good, gory movie that at times forgets what it is: a B-movie with loads of hype.

The movie starts off slow; after the first ten minutes of this movie I found myself asking ‘where are the damn snakes? Get to damn snakes already!’ But ten minutes later, after a brief introduction of all the characters, the plane was in the air and snakes were let loose.; this is when things started to get fun.

The snakes slithered their way through the cabin finding every little opening to wreak havoc and kill passengers. Some of the human deaths are a little disturbing (especially one guywho dies in the lavatory, it had me curled up in a ball in my seat) and some of the snake deaths are pretty amusing (one flight attendent throws a snake into a microwave and sets the timer for two minutes, he then starts talking trash to the snake until it explodes which sents him screaming the other direction).

As much fun as it was watch Samuel L. Jackson be a badass and kill snakes with tazers, broken bottles, and harpoon guns, he doesn’t have enough badass lines. There are maybe two or three memoryable Sam Jackson quotes from this movie- the one in the trailer (”I’m mother##@$ing tired of these mother*&%#ing snakes!”) and another line at the end (my wife’s favorite) “All hail the Playstation 2.”

I also expected this movie to give a nod to the audience, as if to say ‘we know it’s bad too,’ but it never does; this movie takes thinks it’s a serious thriller, not a B-Movie.

Snakes On A Plane won’t break any box office records, but it’ certainly a fun ride.

My brother-in-law sent this semi-personalized message from Mr. Samuel L. Jackson regard, that’s right, Snakes on a Plane! It was funny enough that I sent one to my brother as well.

Anyone can send a “personalized message” from Samuel L. Jackson telling them to go see Snakes on a Plane either through email or phone.

My brother-in-law tried to send it to my phone, but I missed the call and the service doesn’t leave voice mails.

Here’s the link to create your own message about SOAP to friends and family.