Just a little something my brother Andy drew up. Or pointed up. Pointillism style. Since he's my brother, and it's of Indiana Jones, it fits into the theme of my blog pretty nicely. Click on the picture to see the larger version.



Also, below is a little thing I'm going to do from now on, and then I won't have to make those huge Movie Quote threads every once in a while. Yes, I'm obsessed, I know. Whatever.

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Lewis: What do you call a guy that walks into a bar and buys everyone a drink?
Chris: I don't know.
Lewis: A fungi.
The Lookout

Labels: Picture

I'm a poster buff. I enjoy them. I enjoy looking at them, I enjoy buying them, I enjoy talking about how most movie posters are generally terrible nowadays. Squishing as many floating heads onto a poster as possible, just for the sake of cramming every star in the movie on it, has to be my biggest movie poster pet peeve - sometimes it works, but when the focus of the poster is on the people in the movie, rather than the "feel" of it, that's the deadly difference. Then there are the instances when a movie has a great theatrical poster, but the studio decides to butcher it for the DVD just to slap a recognizable face on it. Another, is the lack of poster art; Most movie posters nowadays look like they are done incompetently with Photoshop -- and heck, they probably are. What ever happened to that impressive, incredibly lifelike poster art, though? Now folks, let me share with you my ten favorite movie posters at this given moment. Enjoy.

Labels: Lists, Movies

If there is any lesson we need to learn from the whole Virginia Tech situation, it's that even with visible signs, we'll never know who is and who isn't a ticking time bomb. We just don't know. If we spent out lives constantly monitoring and looking over our shoulders at the students and people who we think possibly could do something crazy someday, then we'd never get anything done. We'd never sleep. There are a lot of weird people at there, but 99.9% of them wouldn't be capable of doing such a horrendous act, nor do I think it would ever cross there mind. Yes, that even includes that kid in my 10th grade English class that sat in the back, wore all black, and often spoke of how he wished he could control fire with his mind. Was he capable of something like this? I really don't think so, but how could I ever know? Isn't Mr. Joe Jock who often flips out on the referees, punching walls and swearing, when a call doesn't go his way just as likely?

There were signs that Cho Seung-Hui wasn't all there, it's true, and maybe he even fit the stereotype of a school shooter. I don't know. For one, he insisted he had a supermodel girlfriend named Jelly. Other times, he would call his roommate and say his name was Question Mark, and refused to admit otherwise until one day when he was caught. He wrote disturbing plays and refused to have any sort of social interaction outside a few muttered words here and there. He was accused of stalking two girls. His roommate feared he might commit suicide. People reached out to him - his roommate constantly showed him compassion even when he wouldn't respond to a simple "Hello" and wanted to sleep with the light on. Still, he came from a seemingly normal family and even had a sister who graduated from Princeton and is now working for the US government. Yet, Cho's life still ended in a fury of hate and destruction. We'll probably never know why he did what he did.

Already though, the finger pointing is happening. Gun control is the problem? Give me a break - if guns are harder to get, and somebody really wants one, they'll get one, just like it's easy to get anything illegal here if you really want it, whether marijuana, crack, child porn, or a hooker. These men and women haven't even been buried yet, and the fingers are already aimed at movies like Old Boy, because he took a picture of himself holding a hammer that was similar to a scene in the movie. Having seen Old Boy (and throughly enjoying it), that movie had nothing to do with mindless murder. If anything, Cho reminded me more of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver - his monotone and emotionless voice, his warped view on reality and his senseless rambling, his obviously infatuation with the guns while he held them. But hey, when something like this happens, always blame it on the movies or the music (which in this case won't work, since his roommate says he was obsessed with Collective Soul and played "Shine" constantly). It's only extra convenient for the media that Old Boy also happens to be a Korean made film, eh?

It just can't be the fact that this young man was simply out of his mind, can it? He was insane. Disturbed. Wacko. Delusional. Maybe Cho had some sort of reason in his mind for doing this, I honestly don't know, but there doesn't have to be a reason.

Lastly, I don't know if NBC airing the videos and pictures sent by this killer was the right thing to do or not. A lot of the family and those involved have spoken out furiously against giving him the spotlight and the finale that he obviously wanted when he sent those 40-some pictures and those videos to Rockefeller Center. It is what he wanted, but did NBC have the right to show it all to the public? Did they have the right not to? Is it right to go from seeing footage of crying students, of all this death, or Cho's warped ramblings, and then cut to a commercial with the Geico caveman? Is it fair to the parents and family and friends and everybody involved? Is it fair to Cho's parents and his sister? Is anything fair or right? I don't know.

Just be prepared for the media blaming, the psychologists and criminologists theorizing, Michael Moore being an idiot, and bloggers like myself putting in their two cents, all while those involved that lived are simply trying to get back to a normal life again and forget what they experienced.

Labels: Current Events

It's April 16... and it was snowing today. This time last year, I was in 88 degree weather and recovering from a severe case of sun burn. Granted, I was 1,148 miles south of here in Lakeland, Florida, but if I remember correct (which I always do) I don't think it was this cold up here anyway. Other than that though, life has been just dandy.

Work at the Riverside started back up, so now I can spend money again without feeling too guilty -- and putting big numbers in my checkbook under "Deposit" rather than "Payment" will feel pretty good again as well. I like waitering. I like to talk and meet strange, old people who like their bacon burnt to a crisp and get mad when their toast is cold, but I can't lie and say that I won't miss sleeping in on the weekends. I got kind of used to it again. I'm sure I'll get used to waking up at 5:30 AM again in no time though. I remember all through high school, me waking up before noon during the summer was rare, and waking up before 11 AM was the most atrocious of sins. Oh, how things change. Sometimes it's weird to think that I've already been out of high school for two years, and it's been three since I went to Cambridge Springs High School. Is this all that getting old is anyway? Constantly looking back and thinking about how it didn't seem so long ago that you got your license or had basketball practice every day after school or wasted countless hours playing Halo because that's just what people did?

I found out just yesterday that an old acquaintance from my school (the ex-girlfriend of an old really good friend of mine actually, a gal who is also the mother of this fellow's child) is being sought after by the police along with some new boyfriend for armed robbery of the beer distributor in Cambridge, and that they had the baby in the backseat of their getaway car. What possibly made her think that the two of them could rob a place in Cambridge without being identified, when she'd lived here since elementary school is beyond me. I've done a lot of stupid and questionable things in my life, but c'mon... what happened to common sense?

I've been thinking of comprising a list of my favorite books, but realized nobody would care except me. Either way, I still recommend Steinbeck's East of Eden, Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Bradburt's Fahrenheit 451, and Bruce Campbell's must-read autobiography If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor... and of course, Stephen King's The Dark Tower - the seven book series Sara and I are both conquering now. I bet those would all have been on the list had I made it. I'm still working on my Top 100 movie list though. It's just about impossible. I have it narrowed down to about 150 movies, but now the real challenge lies ahead: cut out 50 of them, and then actually put them in some sort of order. Maybe I'll just make a general list of "Must See Movies" in no order... but I haven't come this far just to sell out like that. I'll get it, I promise... and because all of you must care so much to see it, I won't let you down.

Anyway, I'm only posting this and typing what is coming to my mind, for no other reason than I feel bad that I never post anymore. I check my stats sometimes, and there are 15-20 different people that come here every day, and every day I feel I've let those people down. I'm a bad blogger. I never claimed I was a good one, but sometimes the cold, hard truth hits you like a Mack truck on a frosty Tuesday evening in December on your way to a Celtics game (do you ever read sentences like this? They've never made sense to me, but I constantly see writers doing stuff like this - who gets hit by Mack trucks on cold Tuesday evenings anyway, you know?).

I'm all scheduled for next semester. I was going to take 21-credits, but only scheduled 18. I could squeeze another class in there, but I haven't decided whether I should yet or not. For the sake of my grades (and my sanity), I probably shouldn't. It's not that it'd be that hard, but reading takes a lot of time, and so does work, and I'd like to have a little free time to sleep sometimes.

In other news, after work on Sunday, I realized I didn't want my hair. So, I pulled out the Conair clippers, tore off my shirt Hulk style, and shaved it off. There's still a little there, but I was just sick of paying $9 every time I got my haircut (I'm sorry, Laura, I never meant to hurt you... but you're killing my wallet), and I was sick of my bangs itching my forehead, so I just said, "Begone wit' it" and it begoned.

Yeah.

Labels: Rambling

Last weekend, Sara and I caught a small, modestly budgeted drama thriller called The Lookout. It didn't have a great trailer by any means (what can you expect though... the people that make trailers are incompetent morons - but that's a blog rant for another day), yet I still was looking forward to it, having seen Joseph Gordon-Levitt pull off some insanely impressive performances in both the recent independent films Brick and Mysterious Skin. Yeah, yeah, he's the kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun - but Harrison Ford had crappy bit parts on ten television shows before he ever became a star.

Anyway, the film was loved by the critics (not that it means a whole lot, but Roeper even hailed it a masterpiece, a word not thrown around too often in the biz) -- and well, I loved it just as much. In fact, it was probably the best movie I've seen all year. It was better than 300, and probably even better than Zodiac, which was awesome. Simply put, it was a smart movie that didn't rely on the hokey heist or the memory loss that could have become really gimmicky; it relied on well-written dialogue, a clever script, some actual character development (maybe this is what's scaring people away), and just great performances. I'm telling you right now, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the best actor in his age range - the next Robert Downey Jr. even. Yeah, I think this guy might even be better than Ryan Gosling, and if you know me, you know that's saying a lot.

Yet, after two weeks, this movie has only pulled in $3.8 million dollars. After two weeks, it's dropped to #17 in the box office. What's the deal with this? Granted, it was only in 955 theaters, compared to 2,500-3,400 for most other movies, but ratio-wise, the lack of money it pulled in is still a crime. After 6 weeks, Wild Hogs has still pulled in nearly $7 million over the past weekend, the mindless action movie Shooter pulled in $6 million after 3 weeks, and Blades of Glory banked $22 million on its second week, but The Lookout can't even quite pull in $4 million in two weeks of release, even with critical praise, an impressive 7.5/10 on IMDb, and Jeff Daniels co-starring?

What is wrong with people? If I'm sounding pushy and bitter, it's because I'm trying to. When people flock to see crappy movies, the studios are going to keep making them - and can you blame them really? Go see The Lookout. That's what I'm saying to you! If you don't like it, I'll give you your money back.

Labels: Movies, Rambling