I had the good fortune to be invited out for a bowling evening with friends at Dave & Busters last night. The venue was nice but played havoc with my ADD; too many flashing lights and noisy machines. Bowling was fun, and when I settled into a groove I actually did pretty well. Don’t go there expecting a decent draught beer selection, though.
Many of my favorite all-time movies are on this list, and with good reason. I will need to seek out a copy of Six String Samurai and rewatch Zardoz; I didn’t like Dark Star all that much, and A Boy And His Dog was boring. But the Fifth Element, Repo Man, Big Trouble In Little China, and Buckaroo Banzai are classics. Oh, and it looks like I’m going to have to see John Dies At The End, too. Because Clancy Brown.
Friday evening I drove to meet 1/2 of Jen’s family in Columbia for dinner after work. We hung out and shot the breeze for a while, then reconvened at a nearby Coldstone for ice cream. YUM. As usual my eyes were bigger than my stomach, so I had to pack up half of what I’d bought and bring it home. The evening was capped off with a moonlight drive home in the Scout, which was actually quite pleasant after the sun had gone down. One thing that’s nagging me is the absence of license plate lights in back–I have the plate zip-tied to the swing arm in front of the mount. Last thing I want right now is a moving violation ticket.
I spent much of Saturday laid up with the girl on the couch, watching Nick Jr. and coughing up my lungs while Jen worked on a photo shoot in the dining room. At this point I’m about done with the Fresh Beat Band, though in their defense they appear to be the happiest four people walking the earth. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before a sex and heroin soaked “Behind The Music” is produced exposing the seamier side of life as a Rock Star. We regretfully opted out of a barbecue with the Hoerrs that afternoon; the heat was too much and I for one would not have been in top form.
Sunday was much the same; mostly relaxation and low-key activities. We rose too late to get ready for church, but the presence of two Trane service trucks in the parking lot spoke volumes: my guess is that they haven’t got air conditioning in the summer wing fixed yet. We did rally by noontime to go out and see Brave in a blast-chilled theater down by the airport. Finn seemed to like the movie, though I think she had a hard time following plot threads. Being a Pixar movie there were more than just a few simple themes to grasp, so we did our best to fill her in as the movie progressed. As an adult, I liked it a lot; while it’s not their best movie, it deserves more credit than it’s getting by the critics. Jen and I talked about it briefly over dinner–the rap on Pixar is that all their movies are about boys with daddy issues; this is a girl with mommy issues. What I think the critics forget, though, is that these are all, at heart, kids’ movies. As a kid, the biggest source of conflict is usually with one’s parents. So mommy/daddy issues are the bread and butter of a real kids’ movie. This is generally why Pixar movies work better than, say, Shrek, which is an adult’s movie masquerading as a kid’s fairy tale (and stuffed full of stale adult pop-culture references).
Anyway, I enjoyed it, and I think Finn did too. She crashed out on the way home, right around the time I realized I’d left my phone in the theater. I activated the Find My Phone service through iCloud, which told me it was sitting at the lost & found waiting for me to pick it up. Well done, Apple.
I’m listening to Retraction, a follow-up on a This American Life broadcast about working conditions in Apple factories in China, which were subsequently discovered to be fabricated. It’s just mind-blowing to hear the guy squirm under direct cross-examination.
Wes Anderson’s new movie is called Moonrise Kingdom, and it looks great.
Here’s a great remembrance and primer on a holiday classic I doubt few people outside of my narrow age range would remember: Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas.
I was too old to give a shit about Saved By The Bell, but this epic review of Dustin Diamond’s memoir makes the author sound like a mentally unstable, insecure douchebag.
Tired. Very tired. Working on the 10-20 stuff last night; it’s going well, and the money’s good. Gotta keep it going until we get the site looking tight. I have a meeting with the Gebran folks tonight to see what they need; hopefully there’ll be another month or so of development on their product/s to keep the freelance going. So far we’ve billed and been paid and there’s another invoice out, with the promise of work in the summer-fall for Oakleaf.
I watched the rest of the Aliens special edition DVD the other night and I’ve been thinking about it ever since—it was my favorite movie in 1986 or 87 when it came out, and it hasn’t aged too badly. Probably also because I played the game yesterday—it’s hard. And frightening as hell- the movement on the aliens is a lot faster in the game, and they mess you up quickly. It’s hard to play as the Marine, and you get a real sense of how hard it would be to stay alive without a team with you (which is how the demo sends you out.)
I watched a Netflix On Demand movie last night while working called Monsters, and I was blown away. I think that Roger Ebert probably sums it up best in his review; I enjoyed it for many of the same reasons he did. The titular monsters are secondary to the characters, and the entire thing is shot by an actual photographer with an eye for moving images and subtle performances. The director did all the post production in his bedroom, and it’s exactly enough to serve the story without being CGI for CGI’s sake. Go check it out.
Working very, very late last night, I streamed “Less Than Zero” over Netflix on my second monitor. What a time capsule that movie is. From the fashions to the hairstyles to the subject matter to the music selections, it’s a fascinating portrait of the excesses, glamour, personalities and pathos of the Hollywood filmmaking machine in the late 80’s. Andrew McCarthy, the poster boy for ineffectual, feminine protagonists of the John Hughes era, actually does a pretty good job overall. Jami Gertz was inexplicably cast as a jaded, experienced party girl, and she comes off as a whiny teenager (some of her line readings made me actually cringe). Robert Downey Jr. was amazing, as usual, and completely sold the character of Julian; James Spader had the smarmy evil creep thing down to a science by then—a little hair gel and a pastel suit were all it took. There were a ton of tiny details I missed as a 17-year-old that made me smile twenty years later, and I’ve had the Bangles’ Hazy Shade of Winter going through my head all morning.