Labels: Movies

The trip to Connecticut with Sara was a great time. You can read about the whole Indiana Jones 4 casting deal over here (and this story of mine was picked up by the biggest Indiana Jones site on the net The Raider, yay!), but I'll talk about the rest of the trip. First of all, I don't know if I'm cast as an extra or not yet. They're supposedly making all of the calls by Friday, June 22 (tomorrow), so chances are pretty slim now. Either way though, I'm not going to be disappointed. I gave it a shot and had a nice little four day vacation with Sara, so it was definitely worth it.
After the casting call and walking around Yale campus and New Haven a bit, we got some directions from two very Italian bicycle police (think Sylvester Stallone in a cop uniform on a bike) how to get the famed Pepe's Pizza. We drove our way into Little Italy and stopped there and got ourselves a cheese pizza - and it was excellent. Amazing really, even if it scalded the top of my mouth, because I didn't have the willpower to wait for it to cool down. The pizza is cooked right over a coal fire, and I guess it's one of the only places in America that still does that. If you ever go visit Yale for some reason, possibly in search for a grad school, you'll be doing yourself a huge disservice by not stopping at Pepe's.
From there, we drove our way into New London, Sara's old home town until around 4th grade, and drove around for a while, so I could see where the majority of Sara's childhood took place, and so she could remember it all herself. Then we drove to her Aunt Vicky's really nice house about 10 minutes North of New London, took our stuff in, met her Uncle Tino (I swear, he's Robert De Niro's brother) and their son, then took off again to check out the huge casino, Mohegan Sun. Very cool place (and I guess it's the second largest casino in the world, according to the interwebs). Then we went back home and watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, because there is no better way to end a great day.
The next day and a half we spent around New London, checking out various places, eating at restaurants Sara remembered from her childhood, walking around by the ocean and looking for little crabs, looking at Fort Trumbull and Fort Griswold, sites where Benedict Arnold, the famous traitor to America, took over with British troops - really neat stuff. We also went over to Mystic and checked out this place that was built solely for mothers around the world, Olde Mistick Village. Then we drove around, walked around some, and even walked right past Mystic Pizza. Yes, that's right, maybe you've seen that cheesy romantic comedy with Julia Roberts? It was filmed and took place right at that pizzeria. Mystic's other claim to fame was the filming of Spielberg's Amistad in that very town.
Of course, we did plenty of other stuff, but I'll leave it at that. The drives there and back were about 8 or 9 hours each, but they went quick and were a good time. Sara is some good company and her car is comfortable. If I can leave you with any advice, it's this: don't ever eat at a Roy Rogers if you're at a rest stop in New York. It's a poor man's KFC - but it's just as expensive. Oh yeah... and if you ever get a chance to be an extra is a movie, take it - because why not?

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Indiana: It's disgraceful, you're old enough to be her... her grandfather.
Henry: Well, I'm as human as the next man.
Indiana: Dad, I *was* the next man.
-Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Labels: Rambling

Sara and I went to this massive book sale up at Villa Maria with her mother and friend. I ended up spending $10 and got 22 books out of it (Sara spent $8 and got somewhere around 20 books too). They were 3 for $1 soft cover or 1 for hardback. Can't really beat that... except now I have all these books to add to my list and since I don't read enough, I imagine I won't need to go to the library for quite a while. So, like the post of mine before, any suggestions on where to start would be just fine by me.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck
The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck
Slaughsterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Death of Ivan Ilich by Leo Tolstoy
My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin
The Regulators by Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
Carrie by Stephen King
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Beanth Mulholland by David Thomson
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
The House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
Zodiac by Robert Graysmith
Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Steven Spielberg
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks
Gai-Jin by James Clavell
Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi
Lincoln by Gore Vidal

Then when we got back to Sara's house, I grabbed her copy of In Dubious Battle (Steinbeck) and The Catcher in the Rye. These should keep me busy for a long, long time.

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Colonel Vogel: What does the diary tell you that it doesn't tell us?
Henry Jones Sr.: It tells me that goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them.
-Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Labels: Books, Rambling

In the past year, I've gotten back into reading for pleasure again (with most of the thanks going to Sara), which sometime during the middle of my high school years I ceased doing for reasons still unknown. Well, okay, maybe they are known -- I guess video games and movies were just more entertaining at the time. Of course, I read three of my favorite books during my last two years of high school (Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, Steinbeck's East of Eden, and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby) and I had a very pleasurable time reading them, but had I not been forced, my favorite book would probably be some Michael Crichton book I stole off Andy's bookshelf back in the elementary school days.

I've mentioned before how I've gotten into Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, which is an amazing combination of fantasy and the western (he describes it as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly meets Lord of the Rings). I'm four books into the seven book series and the fourth book (Wizard and Glass) might just be the best one yet, although depending on my mood, my opinion shifts between that and the first one (The Gunslinger). I'm not an expert on American literature by any means, but I'd say that King is a master of the English language and one of the best writers out there today - whether or not someone likes the kind of stories he writes, I'm not sure how they could deny that. Read On Writing, his no-BS book that is half autobiography on how he became the writer that he is today, and half his tips, thoughts, opinions, and ideas on writing in general. If you like to write, it's 100% essential reading, no question and should probably be included in every Creative Writing class.

After the first four Dark Tower books in a row, I decided to take a break and finally got around to reading Harper Lee's classic To Kill a Mockingbird. Talk about a perfect adaptation from book to movie; the movie naturally left out small details, but completely kept the complete feel and the major themes of the book. More movie-makers that adapt novels need to look at that for an example (yes, I'm looking at you and your dreadful East of Eden adaptation, Elia Kazan). It was a great book though, and Atticus Finch is definitely in my top 5 characters from literature ever (oh nice, I sense another List coming). You know what pisses me off though? Harper Lee. She wrote this one incredibly crafted masterpiece and then decides to just quit writing altogether. If you have a gift like that, if your writing can make that much of an impact, if you can put together words in a way that powerful, why deny the world that gift? I'll never understand that, especially when writing is something anyone can do until the day they die.

Now, I'm 150 pages into this great swashbuckling adventure book called Captain from Castile by Samuel Shellenbarger. It's critically acclaimed (although from the looks of it, rarely talked about - I had never even heard of it until stumbling upon it accidentally one day on Amazon), sold a few million copies back in the 1940s when it was published, and has been compared to The Count of Monte Cristo. I was sold on that comparison. It's about a young, honest nobleman in Spain and his family that get caught up in a scandal due to corrupt church officials during the Spanish Inquisition of the 16th Century, so he's forced to flee and ends up going across the sea to the New World, where he meets up with Hernando Cortes - you know, the guy who conquered Mexico.

Once finished with that, I have a junk load of books sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read: Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Orwell's 1984, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the first book in the acclaimed Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series A Game of Thrones (as recommended by my good friend Corey), an epic samurai adventure tale Shogun by James Clavell, a couple of the James Fenimore Cooper Leatherstocking Tales novels (ya know... Natty Bumppo aka Hawkeye, The Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer... there ya go), Chuck Palaniuk's Survivor, Frank Herbert's supposed sci-fi masterpiece Dune, the second half of Black Hawk Down, some easy-read Indiana Jones novels... and to top it all off, the Great American Book Sale is going on this next week up in Erie, and I know Sara and I will be going sometime - Sara is quite the book enthusiast herself. I guess you pay something like $5 and you get a bag and you can stuff it with as many books possible. Or something like that, I dunno. Either way, I'm going to have enough books to keep me busy for a year or two, especially since I'm hoping to get into more of King's work like The Stand, Salem's Lot, The Shining, It, and Cell, some James Ellroy like L.A. Confidential (although I never finished White Jazz - it was a tough read), Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Richard Matheson's well regarded vampire novella I Am Legend, and some Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, The Road)0 since he seems to be the hottest thing in literature right now.

Any suggestions on where to start? Or what books I should add to my ever growing 'Must Read' list?

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Alison: I'm pregnant.
Ben: Pregnant... with emotion?
-Knocked Up

Labels: Books, Rambling

If you haven't heard, Harrison, George and Stevie are all getting back together for one final adventure as filming on Indiana Jones 4 starts this month in New Haven, Connecticut. It just so happens that it's going to have a few scenes filmed at Yale and they need a bunch of extras, so they're having an open casting call. While I was admittedly skeptical of driving 500 miles for this at first, pretty much everyone insisted I was crazy and foolish for actually considering not going, seeing as I have a completely healthy and doctor-approved obsession with the Indiana Jones movies, and well, movies in general.

So yeah, Sara didn't have to work for these few days and I was able to get work off Monday through Wednesday, so we are going to pack up on Sunday after we're both out of work, get my headshot, some 1950s-style clothes, and my credit card and make the nearly nine-hour trek to Connecticut so I can go to the open audition. Conveniently, Sara grew up only 45-minutes away from New Haven and still has a lot of family there, so we'll get to kill a few birds with one stone here. Works out pretty nice.

While there are certainly going to be loads of people at the open auditions, at the very least, I can say that I tried and tell my kids one day while we're watching Indy 4, "Yep, I was at the auditions to be an extra for this scene; see that guy that just fell over? He was four people ahead of me in line."

It should be a great time either way.

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Belloq: How odd that it should end this way for us after so many stimulating encounters. I almost regret it. Where shall I find a new adversary so close to my own level?
Indiana: Try the local sewer.
-Raiders of the Lost Ark

Labels: Movies, Rambling